Mailbag: Creating an installable layout for non-English Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions

Question:

I found your blog article describing how to create an installable network layout for the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions.  I want to use these steps to create layouts for non-English versions of the Express Editions.

I saw the section titled Additional notes for non-English Express Editions, and in that section you stated that the URLs are different in the non-English data files.  When I look at the data files for a non-English Express Edition, the URLs appear to be identical to the ones in the English data files.  Also, when I try to download the files from those URLs, it appears to be downloading the English binaries.

How can I create an installable layout for a non-English Express Edition?

Answer:

The URLs for the binaries that are a part of the Express Editions are forwarding links (fwlinks) and they should automatically redirect to the correct non-English version if you attempt to navigate to them and download the binaries on a non-English OS.  For example, if you are downloading the files to create an installable layout on a Spanish version of Windows, the URLs will redirect to the Spanish version of the binaries.

If you want more granular control over which language version is downloaded, you can add the specific language code information to the end of each URL when you download the binaries.  Although it is not listed in the previous blog article, you can add a variable to the end of each URL to specify the exact language to download.  The variable is named clcid and it can be set to the hexadecimal value that corresponds to the language code (LCID) for the desired language.

For example, the previous article lists the URL https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=51433 to download SQL Express.  If you want to download the Spanish version of SQL Express, you can add the clcid value 0x40C (which is the hexadecimal value 3082) and create a new URL that looks like the following: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=51433&clcid=0x40C.

The following table lists the clcid value to add to the end of each URL listed in the previous blog article in order to download specific language versions of the Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition binaries and create an installable layout: