Contacts Control Now Available in 9 Languages

We've just rolled out an update to the Windows Live Contacts control, adding language support for German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese! That's on top of the English, French, and Japanese we hacked together by hand earlier. If my fingers are correct, that's 9 languages covering several of the largest populations of web users worldwide.

You can see them in action in the contacts control list view: dev.live.com/mashups/trycontactscontrol/ and tile view: dev.live.com/mashups/trypresencecontrol/   Select a language from the dropdown list in the middle of the test page and the control will reload with those strings.  You can even switch languages after you've signed in!

You specify the language or regional market you want in the "market" attribute of the contacts control.  If you don't care about regions, you can just request by language code ("en"), too.  But be careful with that - when we get around to adding support for date fields and region-appropriate address formatting, you'll want to care about the region as well as the language.

Popup blockers resolved

We also rearranged the work flow to eliminate the popup blocker hazard when writing contact data to the contacts control using the write API.  The user is now prompted to review the submitted data.  It's the same review dialog as before, but by opening that window in response to a user click on the control, we avoid setting off any popup blocker landmines.  (Popup blockers block OpenWindow() calls made independent of user action.  Opening a window in response to a user click will not trigger the popup blockers)