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The question brings out one of the less intuitive behaviors of .NET Globalization: Guys, I know I have already bugged you about this, but this thing keeps puzzling me. The most harmless .NET code on Earth Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("H:mm:ss", new CultureInfo("pa-Arab-PK"))); prints...

Doug Ewell commented in response to The relationship between the 'United States - International' keyboard layout and the Euro.... : And now, on The Unicode List™, we have someone wanting to know the position where INDIAN RUPEE SIGN will be added to the "U.S. English" keyboard. I don't know if...

The question the other day was: My code calls GetNumberFormat(“0”) and this returns “.00” on a zh-cn system and “0.00” on an English system. We take the pre-decimal portion of the string and end up with a null string in the zh-cn locale. Are there flags to GetNumberFormat...

The WM_UNICHAR message has had an interesting history. Over time it has come up in this Blog occasionally, in blogs like Will the real Unicode character message please stand up? , which tend to be more generous in suggesting apps on Windows should just take it if they want to, but by 2008 questions...

Previous blogs in this series: part 12: Emoji + IDN == U+1F4A9 (PILE OF POO) part 11: There's no place like ::1, not even 127.0.0.1! part 10: Who needs IDN support? How much? When? (Part 2) part 9: Who needs IDN support? How much? When? (Part 1) part 8: Punycode don't do the PUA ...

The question came in just the other day: Hi Michael, Do you have a list of all the keyboard cultures in Win8—or alternately which API would return me such a list (looking at your blog(s) I couldn’t easily determine what this API would be. All the APIs seemed to be about installed keyboards...

The question came in just the other day: I noticed that in some locales the LOCAL_SNATIVEDIGITS have special digits, but the LOCALE_IDIGITSUBSTITUTION isn't set to use them. What's up with that? Yeah, we do that sometimes.... Kind of the opposite problem of when we turn digit substitution...

This blog today is about a character in Unicode. U+00a0, aka NO-BREAK SPACE, specifically. I could have made it an Every Character Has a Story blog, almost. Except it is really going to be about locales on Microsoft platforms, rather than a history and/or story of the character itself. ...

Tuesday May 8th, 2012 was yesterday. For many, it was just another day. Some births, some deaths. Some weddings. Maybe even some divorces. Just like any other day. But for another group, it was a really big day. A day that might hole up in some small way to those who came in, those who...

So there is a blog I planned on writing in a week or two. It was based on stuff people had been asking me after I blogged Can't Touch This! (Though I can TYPE this because I have the hardware, and the keyboard…) . About the touch optimized soft keyboard layouts... Feedback was basically...

You might be tired ot me blogging about Digit Substitution . I mean, it has been a rather commonly covered topic, over the years. The entire issue can often be thought of as a pitched battle between competing forces. One of the fundamental forces pushing us away from it is the one embodied by...

Over in the Suggestion Box, Joshua Boyce asked: I have been reading your series "Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout", and in part 10a ( blogs.msdn.com/.../581107.aspx ) you hint at an upcoming 10b part to the series... Any chance that this series could be expanded to complete coverage of...

Our story thus far: It was almost 4½ years ago that I wrote some basic rules. Rules for developers. Rules for developers about keyboards. I was even faux pompous enough to refer to them as my Michael's Keyboard Laws for Developers . :-) The first law: VK_A is not always 'A' . ...

Like many of the people I know, I find myself looking over at Stack Overflow and related sites periodically, sites like programmers.stackexchange.com. I'm usually pleased to pop in. I'll admit it is seldom relevant to me these days, since I don't do so much dev work, and the work I do is usually...

It was almost 4½ years ago that I wrote some basic rules. Rules for developers. Rules for developers about keyboards. I was even faux pompous enough to refer to them as my Michael's Keyboard Laws for Developers . :-) The first law: VK_A is not always 'A' . The second law: Not every...

So I recently got an email: We recently had a bug filed against our team because on a PS-PS machine we were unable to do a proper search with a greek character. It turned out that the issue was caused because some greek lowercase characters do not compare correctly against their uppercase counterparts...

In the past, I've written many times about ConvertDefaultLocale -- you can check them out here . Mostly, I just complain about weird silliness that the function does in it's strange efforts to convert neutral LCIDs to specific LCIDs, and to try to bridge differences between the .Net Framework and...

The bug report: STEPS: 1. Create a custom list in SharePoint 2. Click List tab...Create Column...Date and Time 3. Give the field a name and click ok to create the column 4. Add a new item to the list 5. For the date field, choose Feb 17, 2011 EXPECTED RESULT: Date is displayed with Hebrew new year...

Over in the Suggestion Box, sk asked: Hi Michael, I noticed you've discussed Font Linking multiple times in your blog posts. In some of your posts, you alluded to the fact that scaling of the font size is done by GDI when using font linking. Could you elaborate more on the algorithm that GDI uses...

The other day in The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 22: Digit Substitution 2.0 , I waxed on quite enthusiastically about the capabilities of Digit Substitution in the Windows Runtime (WinRT). Since then. I've had a bunch of people ask me to provide some more details to justify me interest...

Previous blogs from this series: part 21 (The Windows 8 Hijripalooza extraordinaire!) part 20 (Yes, it's Bangla. Not Bengali!) part 19 (In honor of International Mother Language Day...) part 18 (Two scripts that share ten digits can be trouble) part 17 (Today I feel like translating...

Not everyone reads my Blog. And I'm not just talking about everyone in the world. Or everyone in the country. Or everyone in the city. Or everyone at Microsoft. Frankly, not even all the people on my team read it. Hell, I am pretty sure that most days my boss's boss and boss's boss...

Some long-time regular readers may recall when I blogged Cyrillic looks so spacy when viewed from some parts of East Asia.... from almost five years ago. Here is the art I showed at the time: See what happens with the "spacy" Cyrillic text? :-) At the time, SDiZ commented: I believe this...

Yesterday in When you have two different models, the easiest place to fall short is in the interaction between 'em… , I talked about the problems with the way there were two different models for time and date formatting, one of them clearly inadequate. And how over the last several versions...

The locale-specific formatting support supported by the NLS API in Windows works via two different (semi-complementary) methods: POSIX style settings meant to be descriptive of how the formatting works per locale, and The actual format string based support meant to give more exact descriptions...