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Today's blog starts with an inspirational video ( warning : fairly safe for work other than some language) to set the stage: Now we laugh -- and especially fans and regular readers of this Blog will laugh -- at the idea of a video game meant to be so amazingly and intensely realistic that could...

The other day in Sometimes MMM is MMMM, other times MMM is M! (aka Not all abbreviations are created equal) , I included a table of data from Day, Month, Year, and Era Format Pictures : d Day of the month as digits without leading zeros for single-digit days. dd Day of the...

There are several LCTYPE values suitable for use by GetLocaleInfo and GetLocaleInfoEx that act as abbreviations. Like the seven LOCALE_SABBREVDAYNAME* values representing the days, which are documented as: Native abbreviated name for [Day]. The maximum number of characters allowed for this string...

Apologies to Grace Slick for the title riff! Previous blogs from this series: part 16 (We can't scale to a Xishuangbanna Dai locale, but…) part 15 (Fixing our listings up in Windows 8!) part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again...

So the other day, I was contacted by hal hubschman, with a message. Kind of a request for information. It went like this: Subject : on screen keyboards i read a number of your blog entries which i found informative. i have been trying to find a osk sdk with no luck. do you know if one...

Previous blogs from this series: part 15 (Fixing our listings up in Windows 8!) part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!) part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO) part 11 (What language is that keyboard...

Previous blogs from this series: part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!) part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO) part 11 (What language is that keyboard for?) part 10 (Perhaps it is best to think...

So, the other day, I wrote How to detect if a locale is Bidi, Windows 7/8 edition . This is a topic I had covered a bunch of times over the years, in many prior blogs, from How To [NOT] detect that a locale is bidi to How To detect that a culture is bidi to Cue the smarter version of GetDateFormat...

The other day when I blogged abut how If someone blathers on about how Windows supports Unicode, you can suggest they just ZIP it, if you like! , I didn't tell the whole story. I focused on Windows, and a peculiar engineered schizophrenia that is Windows compressed folders, the most non-Unicode piece...

Previous blogs in this series: Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 4): On [not] finding the smoking gun Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 3): The hazards of "off label" usage Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 2): Explaining the point of Part 1 Improving genitive. Or not....(part...

Once upon a time, Windows had two kinds of day names. There were the actual day names, which could be queried via the LOCALE_DAYNAME* constants , and eventually the DateTimeFormatInfo.DayNames Property . And there were the abbreviated day names, which could be queried via the LOCALE_SABBREVDAYNAME...

Tomorrow. No sun in Seattle is fairly common this time of year. I've lived here since late '96 and I can count the number of sunny December 30thson one hand, and have fingers left over. It is harder to engineer in Samoa, though. However, for this year, they have achieved the goal! And...

The other day, a colleague asked me a question that disturbed me: Hi Michael, I want our product to get out of the business of maintaining timezones and leave this up to the OS. However, I realized that the system only provides one language at a time, so if the administrator language is English...

So a question got asked late last year: Hi, My customer reported an issue associated with XmlTextReader.ReadChars. The call to XmlTextReader.ReadChars enters an infinite loop: While iRetour = BUFFER_SIZE 'Infinite Loop After this comment... iRetour = myXmlTextReader.ReadChars(buffer, 0, BUFFER_SIZE...

New ways to support input are really all the rage these days - from IMEs to new IMEs to the soft keyboards of Windows 8 to the Swypes and Swipe Its and Sliders and Touch pals and Shape Writers and so on. Technically I am not connected to any of these efforts, even as I Continue to crank out new keyboard...

The other day, when I blogged These aren't the MONTHS you're looking for (aka You'll never get to the 13th month *that* way) , I oversimplified some of the described results in order to concentrate on proving that GetLocaleInfo was never returning the CAL_HEBREW (Hebrew calendar) months, without distracting...

The other day I had somebody call me out about a blog I wrote a little over a year ago. I'll excerpt the mail to avoid some of the more graphic language: Dude, maybe you should read a little before you freaking write! If you query for month names of the current user default when you Hebrew is the...

So, the question I got the other day was: We are setting up SharePoint and want to know what collation to use. What support does SQL Server have for CJK Extensions A/B/C/D? Now that's an interesting question. If you think of SQL Server 2000 as the first version to support the current architecture...

In a comment on a blog I wrote nearly 7 years ago ( How do sort keys work? ), Alexander Savin asked another bunch of questions: If I need to generate a sort key for the string I have to call LCMapString twice: bufferSize = LCMapStringW(..., 0); ...Allocate buffer... LCMapStringW(..., bufferSize...

The other day, in response to GetHashCode vs. Compare vs. SortKey , Alexander Savin commented: Michael, with respect to your comment "The fact that more often people test comparisons by comparing "AAA" to "BBB" shows ..." I would say quite the opposite. It is much more important that a comparison...

A few months ago, Ken Lunde of Adobe noted some mapping differences between several different vendors and the Korean KS X 1001 standard: The small table below shows the fourteen KS X 1001 code points that map differently, depending on the platform: KS X 1001 (GR) Unicode (W = Windows; M = Macintosh;...

Yesterday, I was having an interesting conversation, one that has given me pause. We were talking about Unicode, and the need for components in the OS to do a better job of directly embracing it. This is obviously nothing new around these parts, but a new twist was interjected into the conversation...

There are a lot of people in the world. A subset of those people have some interest in language and technology. A percentage of them are a bunch of people who read this blog from time to time. Some of the those people who read this Blog work for Microsoft. And some of them are in the Puget...

Leo's question was, like many of the questions I cover here, pretty interesting: Hello, I’m writing UI automation for ***REDACTED*** , and dev UI displays number in native Arabic digits for ar-SA. Hence, I was trying to convert my test integers into Arabic digit strings so I can do string...

Previous blogs from this series: part 10: Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design? part 9: Nastaleeq vs. Nastaliq? Either way, Windows 8 has got it! part 8: [Finally] taking care of some [more] languages in Pakistan part 7: That would be a "call and a raise" for Hawaiian...