re: Answering @KristoferA's Burmese Windows/.NET question...

KristoferA — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 02:25:01 GMT

Hi Michael,

Thanks for replying. I didn't know you were in post-op rehab, hope your recovery is going well. Thanks for taking the time to research and blog about this despite that.

Let me give you a bit of background on why I asked: as you know, Burma/Myanmar is opening up for more business with the outside world, and a lot of countries and companies in the region (and worldwide) are paying more attention to Burma (including the first ever state visit to Burma by a US president when Obama and Clinton was there last week).

As a result of this, a client of mine is localizing their website for the Burmese market, so although I am not directly involved in that effort I was asked if I knew how to initialize a Burmese/Myanmar locale in .net. As you pointed out, that fails since .net don't yet have any support for that. However, as you also pointed out: a custom locale seems to do the trick, and the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class seems to be the key to handling it with a custom locale: msdn.microsoft.com/.../system.globalization.cultureandregioninfobuilder%28v=vs.100%29.aspx .

Next, as it goes for fonts, it is great that it has been added to Win8. However, a lot of users (esp in a web setting) can be expected to use other platforms (ranging from XP to Win7, or Mac/Linux/etc). It turns out that Google has some nice web fonts that can be used for that purpose: www.google.com/.../earlyaccess / code.google.com/.../tharlon-font , and of course it would be nice to see if Microsoft can maybe offer something similar by making the MSFT Burmese fonts available for download for Win7/XP/Vista as well...?

On a side-note: I came across something in a forum where someone complained that some glyphs in the Win8 burmese font were not 100% Unicode 5.x compatible. I will see if I can find that again, and will forward you the link.

Anyways, I hope that over the next few months we will see increased support for Burmese/Myanmar locale in different Microsoft products, including earlier Win versions and of course the .net framework. I am sure there are lots of companies eyeing the Burmese market right now, and having support for the language etc in Windows/IIS/ASP.net etc will definitely help...

Thanks again for the follow-up.

Best regards,

Kristofer