Hint for Delphi Prism

Why is it all in English? Can I switch the language? Why does the IDE sometimes use multiple languages?


In a recent workshop Olaf Monien and I held together, the question came up if there was a German version for Delphi Prism. Furthermore, people asked us how to switch the language if possible.

Well, Embarcadero provides English, German, French and Japanese translations for Prism. However, the language cannot be selected, because it is determined by the language of the Visual Studio IDE that Prism is being installed into.

Thus, if you have an English version of Visual Studio, Prism will also be in English. Consequently, you will need to install the German version of Visual Studio in order to use the German localization of Prism.

Personally, I am also not very happy with this solution as I would like to be able to switch the languages as well. I solved the issue by using two virtual machines.

Finally, regarding the last issue mentioned in the caption, a lot of messages being shown inside the IDE are taken from resources inside the .NET framework. The framework is independent from Visual Studio and can be in a different language. Thus, if you have not installed the .NET German language package , the error messages for all exceptions thrown by the framework will be in English (or in the language that a language package has been installed for). As Visual Studio uses MS Build to compile or build .NET projects, these messages will always be taken from the framework. This is frequently the first time one notices that the framework is missing a language package when you are running inside a German Visual Studio IDE and the compiler messages are all in English.

To sum it up, one has to be very considerate which products and language packages one installs in order to end up with the development environment in a language one wants to work in.