Holy shit, the Messenger Web Toolkit team are at it again – who says Microsoft can’t iterate rapidly? The Live Messenger Web Toolkit is now available in no less than 40 languages! So now you can take the world’s most popular IM Service and get it running on your website, provide social capabilities and have it rendered in your audience’s language – nice! It even does right to left too!
![clip_image002[4]](http://www.jamessenior.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/LiveMessengerWebToolkitin40Languages/3DC698E1/clip_image0024_thumb.jpg "clip_image002[4]")
![clip_image002[6]](http://www.jamessenior.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/LiveMessengerWebToolkitin40Languages/35161A88/clip_image0026_thumb.jpg "clip_image002[6]")
There are a couple of ways you can set the language, first in the <html> tags of your web page, for example, check out these different language settings:
<html lang="nl">
<html xml:lang="de">
<html lang="he" dir="rtl">
Secondly, when you do the loader you pass in a language parameter which will get you going:
<script type="text/javascript">
var loader = Microsoft.Live.Core.Loader;
loader.initialize({ 'market' : 'es' });
loader.load(['messenger.ui', 'messenger.ui.styles.core']);
</script>
You can even pass in the localization of the browser into the loader for on the fly language determination:
<script src="http://www.wlmessenger.net/api/3.1/loader.js"></script>
<script>
Microsoft.Live.Core.Loader.initialize({market: window.navigator.browserLanguage || window.navigator.language});
Microsoft.Live.Core.Loader.load(["messenger.ui", "messenger.ui.styles.core"]);
</script>
To see what you can do with the Messenger Web Toolkit, check out Photobucket – they have a nice implementation.
Useful Linkage Love:
Here is the full list of supported languages.
Here is the Product Team’s blog post on the release.
Comparing Shotguns and Lasers for killer Social Media
The Live Messenger Web Toolkit Interactive SDK