Haiku #17
No habla Ingles?
Time for Set UI culture.
Ah: muy bueno.
Granted, you're probably thinking, "Culture? What would people who write haikus about Lync Server PowerShell know about culture?!?" Well, relax: we're not talking about that kind of culture, with fine wines and classical music and wiping your mouth on a napkin instead of your sleeve. Instead, we're talking about UI culture, which is a whole different animal. And something that we do know about.
Note. Although, now that that we think about it, what do you mean when you say that we don't know anything about culture? Are you aware that one of the authors of today's haiku can recite entire episodes of The Simpsons (at least the classic episodes, like the Junior Campers or the X-Files) from memory? Remember this line: "Ah, the Luftwaffe: the Washington Generals of the History Channel?" Did Voltaire or any of those other so-called "cultured" writers ever come up with anything like that? We didn't think so.
To be honest, "UI culture" is just a fancy term for the language and regional settings used in the Lync Server Management Shell. Microsoft Lync Server 2010 is available in a number of different languages, and the Management Shell has been localized accordingly. As you might expect, then, the Set-CsUICulture cmdlet provides a way for you to change the language and regional settings used in the Management Shell.
That's cool, but don't make the mistake of expecting too much out of this cmdlet; that's because of Lync Server Multilingual User Interface (MUI) application. As you may or may not know, with the Windows operating system you can install language files that enable you to easily switch the OS from one language to another, and to another and another. That's not the case with Lync Server, however. With Lync Server, you can choose between two languages: the language used when you installed Lync Server, and English. And that's it. Suppose you installed a Spanish version of Lync Server. By default, that means that the Lync Server Management Shell will also be in Spanish. However, you can switch to an English version of the Shell by using a command like this one:
Set-CsUICulture –Culture "en-US"
To switch back to Spanish (the default language) you simply need to change the culture to default:
Set-CsUICulture –Culture "default"
But how do you switch your Spanish shell to, say, French, or maybe Japanese? Well, you don't: the only way to get French or Japanese is to install the French (or Japanese) edition of Lync Server.
And yes, that means that, if you install the English version of Lync Server, the only language available to you at this point in time is English. That's because the default language is English, and the only other language you can switch to is, well, English.
Oh, and keep in mind that this cmdlet only affects your local instance of the Lync Server Management Shell. You can't run this cmdlet remotely and change the shell being used on another computer. Which simply means that you can change the language used in your copy of the Management Shell, but not the language used in anyone else's copy of the Management Shell.
Which seems fair to us.
Incidentally, the CsUICulture family also contains a second cmdlet: Get-CsUICulture. This cmdlet is designed to simply report back the language being used in the local version of the Lync Server Management Shell. As a result, the cmdlet doesn't even have any parameters; to run it, all you have to do (and pretty much all you can do) is call the cmdlet itself:
Get-CsUICulture
Although here's a little tip for you. If you want to get a few more facts and figures about your language and regional settings, you can also pipe Get-CsUICulture to the Select-Object cmdlet, like so:
Get-CsUICulture | Select-Object *
Give it a try and see what happens.
That's all we have time for today. Well, that and the following quote from Homer Simpson: "Hey, they have the Internet on computers now!" See you tomorrow.