The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 0 (The introduction)

Two of the most funnest parts or speaking at this year's Internationalization and Unicode Conference were:

1) I got to talk about some of the things I do now as a part of my work.

2) I got to talk about some of the cool things that are a part of the upcoming version of Windows.

I imagine talking about some of the more interesting facets of these two things might keep me busy for some time!

You can think of this as the pre-blog for many of the future blogs discussing the very features that you can see more f if you have the //Build Developer Preview.

One important issue to note is that although both the presentation and discussion over the coming months will in some ways seem quite organized, a lot of the actual work was much more disjointed, based on the needs of many different teams and partners and customers.

The apparent organization has much more to do with applying a consistent set of rules and principles across a true Hungarian Goulash of different requests and features and bug reports....

Also, while I'll be able to speak of some of the rules we're following as obvious, if i simply look at many of the items as I did just a few years ago, I can promise you that we learned a lot of the core methods that define the nature of this critical sliver of the job in this very version. Many of the lessons learned are in retrospect obvious and would have been invaluable to know five years ago, and I am completely prepared to forgive every single member of the original NLS team for not recognizing these "obvious truths" since they were terribly obvious to me either, at the time!

I'll also set down some really important ground rules:

I will not be talking about any of this work as innovative.

While I am not judging the individual uses of The"I" Word by many people involved with Windows 8, it is hard not feel like the word is being at least overused if not misused. So I'm going to emphasize the common sense nature of muck of the work, and since the only thing innovative about it is being right where I and others used to be wrong, it feels inappropriate to use that word in the context of what I'll be discussing.

I am not going to talk about creating experiences or sharing experiences or anything like that.

Perhaps the nature of this Blog is in some sense a form of marketing of International and World-Ready features, but my view of some of the basic facets of locales and keyboards and formatting and parsing and collation does not allow me to re-purpose the way I talk about these things. It may be a lack of creativity on my part, but it would feel fake to me to talk about things using these particular "buzzwords". I think I'm a bit too grounded in what I think of as 'the experience of what feels broken" to really feel comfortable talking that way.

Perhaps these ground rules cause my presentation to feel very different that many other, even those covered by others at the recent IUC. I don't find them to be insincere, but I know I'd feel insincere if I tried to emulate them....

One last rule:

I have neither inclination nor desire to violate either non-disclosure agreements or marketing news cycles related to Windows 8.

This last rule seems obvious, but I don't want anyone to misunderstand my intent here, or what I want to accomplish. Any time I talk about stuff you haven't heard before, it is only due the fact that they are doing other things right now, not because I am disclosing anything that you couldn't have found yourself by spelunking through the //Build Developer Preview, or eventually the Beta.

I hope you enjoy the things I talk about,and the thing that I point out. My goal is to enjoy the trip, and further I hope you enjoy it, too.

Okay, we can now let the games begin!