It's already in there, or it's on the way

Warning: this post picks on Scott Hanselman a bit. But it is only in good fun because I happen to think he is an awesome developer/RD/MVP even if he messes up the occasional string comparison. Note his awesome formulation of how to do string comparisons appropriately in that link: Scott's Rule Number 0x5F: Think about your string compares and their context. Make sure you've expressed your true intent correctly.

Remember when I talked about the 25 locales we added in ELK v.1 in the post Lions and tigers and bearsELKs, Oh my! with the following language list?

• Bengali - India
• Croatian - Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Bosnian - Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Serbian - Bosnia and Herzegovina (Latin)
• Serbian - Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cyrillic)
• Welsh - United Kingdom (more info in English, in Welsh)
• Maori - New Zealand
• Malayalam - India
• Maltese - Malta
• Quechua - Bolivia
• Quechua - Ecuador
• Quechua - Peru
• Setswana / Tswana - South Africa
• isiXhosa / Xhosa - South Africa
• isiZulu / Zulu - South Africa
• Sesotho sa Leboa / Northern Sotho - South Africa
• Northern Sami - Norway
• Northern Sami - Sweden
• Northern Sami - Finland
• Lule Sami - Norway
• Lule Sami - Sweden
• Southern Sami - Norway
• Southern Sami - Sweden
• Skolt Sami - Finland
• Inari Sami - Finland

And then later when I talked about 11 locales we added in ELK v.2 in the post ELK stampede! with the following language list?

And remember when I posted about the Mitigation tools for IDN security problems and how I mentioned that the normalization stuff was being shipped along with the package?

Anyway, Scott and I have had an interesting dynamic in the times we have been in the same place -- he points out the stuff that is missing that he wants in the .NET Framework or Windows (or both) OR the stuff that he wants to see in future versions and then I get to point out that what he wants is either going to be added in Vista or that it is already in the product today. :-)

So today as the MVP Expo was wrapping up, I ran into Scott who had several of those questions:

• He talked about several African languages such as Zulu, wondering when they would be added as locales. i got to point out that it had been added in XP SP2, in that first ELK release.
• And then he asked about some other African languages. Which were also there in XP SP2.
• Then he ask about a few more, which it just so happens are coming in Vista. There was one limitation, but he said it was really not a problem for the real-world users, in his opinion.
• Then there was the question of international domain names, which he needed for dasBlog category support with non-ASCII names -- remember that IDN download, available now?
• And then finally he asks about a concerned developer working for him who wants to build a hashing mechanism that is independent of normalization form -- sounds like a job for that IDN download, which includes the normalization APIs.

Clearly, Scott is a man who should read this blog, since 80% of his questions would have been answered before he even made it to the MVP Summit! :-)