Microsoft is making it easier for developers to build applications tailored to users in specific geographic regions worldwide. At the end of the past week, the Visual Studio International Feature Pack 2.0 Beta went live on the Microsoft Download Center and is now up for grabs. The International Feature Pack 2.0 Beta is designed to integrate with Visual Studio 2008 in order to provide developers with a collection of controls as well as a set of class libraries capable of streamlining developers leveraging .NET Framework to build what the company referred to as “world-ready applications.”

Among the enhancements introduced with the latest version of the International Feature Pack the software giant enumerated: “Chinese Text Alignment Class Library and TextBox Controls contains WinForm and WPF TextBox controls that support text alignment for Chinese as well as a class library, which developers can use to draw strings using the Chinese style text alignment. Chinese Auto Complete Class Library and TextBox Controls contains WinForm and WPF TextBox controls that support IME aware autocompletion for Simplified and Traditional Chinese as well as a class library which developers can use to add the IME aware auto-completion feature to standard controls.”

Microsoft explained that Visual Studio International Feature Pack 2.0 Beta was considered an extension to the Microsoft Visual Studio International Pack 1.0 SR1. The International Pack 1.0 SR1 continues to be available for download, and has in fact been updated at the end of March 2009. Among the additions there's the Yomigana Framework, which brings to the table a class library and controls. But of course there's even more.

“Korean Auto Complete Class Library and ComboBox Controls contains WinForm and WPF ComboBox controls that support IME aware auto-completion for Korean as well as a class library, which developers can use to add the IME aware auto-completion feature to standard controls. Numeric Formatting Library provides a class library for formatting numeric data into 5 languages. Arabic support was added in 2.0,” are among the new items delivered with Visual Studio International Feature Pack 2.0 Beta.

Visual Studio International Feature Pack 2.0 Beta is available for download here.