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In a recent blog, I did a huge disservice to a colleague, and I wanted to set the record straight. It was back on February 16th, 2005 at 4:55am that I blogged LOCALE_SABBREVLANGNAME is so not an ISO-639 code . And it was over a year later, on September 27, 2006 at 3:01am that I blogged LOCALE_SABBREVLANGNAME...

In a comment to Blame Canada! aka Where is the RIGHT CTRL key on *this* keyboard, Canada? , Eric Côté responded: I live in Montreal. Most French-Canadians are going to avoid the "multilingual" keyboard and instead opt for the friendlier "Canadian French" keyboard. Even the Surface keyboard...

The OutputDebugString function has a long history. Though perhaps not such a noble one. Now with most Win32 functions that have string parameters, there is a 'W' version that takes Unicode, and an 'A' version that does not. In a just universe, each would have a purpose. It is unfortunate...

They speak of it quietly, so as to not upset the Canadian standards people. But the plain truth is that we simply don't like this keyboard layout . The Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard (CAN/CSA-Z243.200-92) is the one I mean. I could blame Ian James for it (the SLM logs clearly point...

When you use SMS/Text capabilities, you have 160 bytes per text. This makes English the smallest language, and every other language a little bit bigger. And it makes some a lotta bit bigger. If you are using supplementary characters, you'll be a lotta bit biggest! Thank goodness I have unlimited...

The question, as usual, was simple: We have a problem. We installed the Turkish Lira update, and since then we are seeing a question mark whenever we should be seeing the new Lira in our application. It looks right in Regional and Language Options. And in Excel. Did we miss a step here? Well...

The other day, in Microsoft Word: 15 -- Microsoft Windows: 0 , I wrote about a case where everyone ignored Windows and did their own thing. Generally speaking, what Word in particular did was useful to more people than it wasn't. But over in the Suggestion Box, Ernst Tremel asked: I made a Keyboard...

It all started with an innocent question. the innocent questioner asked: Can you point me to any enhancements we are building for Datetime parsing (string + datetime format to a Datetime structure) for Modern C++ apps in the next version of Windows? thanks Our questioner came armed with a dangerous...

I have a song running through my head right now - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) , the original version recorded by The Four Lads : The lyrics are something like this: Istanbul was Constantinople Now it's Istanbul not Constantinople Been a long time gone Old Constantinople's still has Turkish...

My good friend Cathy Wissink sent me email the other day: I assume you know about this, but if not: European Computer Manufacturers Association publishes ECMAScript Internationalization API Specification In December 2012 the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) approved ECMA-402...

This was going to be the month. The month to break the six year streak. The streak where every month at least one person sent me email about a particular issue. And then, a few hours ago, Marcus messed that up. His email in part read: My code for dealing with the Japanese calendar has...

T.S Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock once asked " Dare I disturb the universe? " I may have started thinking along those same lines. Perhaps I should explain why I'm asking Do I dare? Do I dare? for those reading along here who aren't in my mind... After reading How to Jailbreak the Microsoft Surface...

Prior parts in these series such as PowerShell ISE will do *everything* (though some assembly may be required!) and PowerShell ISE (or legacy) will do *everything* (and it's really easy to start!" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/02/15/10393862.aspx">PowerShell ISE (or legacy) will...

Generally speaking, everyone knows software has bugs. There is one class of bugs that, while important to fix, won't mislead or cause wrong decisions to be made. Like this one that just came in: I noticed the prices of these apps are listed in reverse order in Windows 2012 Arabic LPK. For...

The other day, I was reminded about two old blogs of mine: Cyrillic looks so spacy when viewed from some parts of East Asia.... WideCharToMultiByte vs. DrawTextW? In tennis terms, 15-Love! Here's the art: Anyway, I was reminded when a colleague asked me whatever happened to the bug...

The other day, colleague David noticed: Hi all, Does anybody know off-hand if launching Explorer programmatically (using either ShellExecute or ShellExecuteEx) should fail to open a directory containing surrogate pairs? If I first create a directory, say, “c:\コンポ𠮷𠮟㐂“, and then...

I thought I'd blather about the console for a bit. There are three basic kinds of console applications: Most console applications emit data that is read later, usually in other tools; Many other console applications emit data that is generally used right in the console; A few console applications...

Okay, a long hiatus after surgery, I'm going to ease back into blogging. Thank you to all who have wished me well. Those who wished me ill can take solace in the fact that they weren't completely unsuccessful. :-) I will be talking about the injury and the hospital and the nursing home and the...

Kind of a footnote to Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 (and a little about what MS is doing about it) , and all of the exciting things Microsoft did for the Turkish Lira. First described at the 36th Internationalization and Unicode conference, last month... You know, that character...

Sometimes, it is the attempts to simplify that can make things more complicated! Like the other day, when I was asked: Hi Michael, hope your recovery is going well! Do you know how I can get to the US –int’l keyboard (not touch) after adding the German lang pack? I can’t find...

Previous blogs in this series: part 14: It turns out there's no "I" in IE, either part 13: Desktop and Managed and Metro; oh my! 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...

Back in 2006, I put my extreme example string in the blog More on cursor support: the rest of the answer . Many people, even native speakers of bidirectional languages and scripts who do not really know about Unicode or the UBA, find it to be confusing. Now those native speakers of bidirectional...

First, a few prior blogs so you can understand where I'm heading today: Vietnamese is a complex language on Windows On my "Vietnamese Plus" and "pseudo-Form V" constructs What's the difference between Tiếng Việt, Tiếng Việt, and Tiếng Việt? (other than the obvious, I mean) How...

At 7:56pm last night, someone sent me an email. Now getting email is hardly an unusual thing for me. In fact, if you omit spam (and don't class email you don't agree with as spam), it would be an unusual minute if someone hadn't contributed to my inbox! So why on earth would this one particular...

So as Windows 8 was being developed, we had a huge review done of locale data. Quite a few bugs were fixed during that process. And we learned some very interesting issues, as well! Like if you look back at a blog I wrote back in 2005 ( Number format and currency format are not always the same...