Some people have asked whether Windows supports new Japanese Calendar Emperor eras if that becomes necessary. FWIW That information is stored in the registry on Win7/Win8/.Net4.0+: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Calendars...

"Anonymous" asked a good question in a previous post " http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnste/archive/2006/02/17/klingon-in-piqad-windows-vista-custom-locale.aspx#10235416 ", basically leading to "what's the difference between a user locale and a system locale...

Sometimes you want to see what's in a built-in culture, or maybe you want to figure out what data's in an uplevel culture so that you can make a similar custom culture for an older OS. Here's an easy way to dump the LDML files for all of the cultures...

India changed it's currency symbol, and so now we have an update http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496898 to support the new rupee symbol.

So, for whatever reason, you want to know what the LDML that the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder needs is for all the locales for the box. It's pretty trivial, but: using System; using System.Globalization; class DumpAllLocales { static...

"For those of you who sign-in to comment on the MSDN Blogs, there is a change coming on January 27 th 1:00 pm (PST) regarding user accounts and profiles. Please click here to read about this change. If you have questions please leave a comment on...

#1: Is there a really, really good reason you didn't compile your app with the unicode flag? Just the fact that you're asking this question is a pretty big red flag that some user might want to enter Unicode data into your app. Supporting Unicode is pretty...

[Update - Note: A coworker pointed out that it's really Fussball or Fußball, since it's a noun. I knew that, I'm just using the lower case here because domain names get lower cased, which is a seperate issue and I didn't want to complicate the example...

I'm often asked something like "What's the date separator for locale XXX?" Well, not every locale fits our preconceived MM/dd/yyyy concepts. Some of the built-in values that developers may not expect: dd/MM yyyy -- 20/10 2010 -- This one has different...

Well you can't, not yet anyway. Unicode 6.0 adds the new Indian Rupee Symbol at U+20B9 (see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf ) so how do you get it to work? Unfortunately you can’t get it to work immediately ;-(. The problem’s...

The EAI Working Group ( http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/eai/charter/ ) is making rapid progress toward standardizing Unicode email addresses. Unicode email addresses are a terrific feature for people in many countries that don't use Latin/ASCII as a native...

I was asked for a quick sample of how to build a culture, so here it is: 1.) Start an elevated command prompt (have to be elevated to run CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Register()) (press windows key, type cmd, press ctrl+shift+enter is one way). 2...

Someone pointed out the boxes in my blog's title. That's a script some fans use for Klingon, but since it's not in Unicode, you need a pIqaD font to see it correctly. If you really want to see the square boxes, then grab the pIqaD.ttf font from the .zip...

http://موقع.وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر (I don't know what it is, I don't read arabic, I'm just pointing it out as an example.) http://президент.рф (for a cyrillic example, apparently the president of Russia web site). -Shawn

This is old news, but I didn't blog about it yet. 4 IDN ccTLDs have been approved: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-21jan10-en.htm Cyrillic Script Russian Federation (RU): рф Arabic Script Egypt (EG): مصر Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية United...

Around work I'm well known for the Lego in my office (counting in the 10's of thousands of pieces). Last summer I was tricked into building a Lego Space Needle for a space in our old building. As you can see, I dropped the space needle when moving...

Google posted an interesting chart: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/unicode-nearing-50-of-web.html I'm sure Bing has similar data, but since Mark already built the chart it was easier for me to link there :) Hopefully this will mean less code...

Recently on the Unicode list someone asked basically what the biggest number of combining characters could happen in a sequence. It's as many as someone wants to use, though the normalization UTS15 adds a limit, and the font rendering problem gets weird...

I was pointed to this article http://www.microsofttranslator.com/BV.aspx?ref=Internal&a=http%3a%2f%2fwww.bortzmeyer.org%2fidn-et-phishing.html about IDN and homographs, which points out that most of the fear around IDN and phishing is unfounded. Seemed...

I just ran into a bug with SetLocaleInfo() use, and it pretty much reminded me that SetLocaleInfo() stinks. Michael said it years ago and it's still true. The only thing it's useful for is a "Regional and Language Options" type app, and there's already...

Some people have asked what they should do to support IDNA2008 on Microsoft platforms. We provide IdnToAscii() and related functions in the Windows SDK. That's available natively on Vista+, and through idndl.dll on earlier platforms. Idndl is shipped...

If you go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx there's now a Visual Studio 2010 and .Net v4 beta page. The betas are a good place to learn about new releases and provide feedback. -Shawn

Some Zune users ran into a strange problem http://forums.zune.net/2/3/518796/ShowPost.aspx and it seems like the Nation Value in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International\Geo isn't there on some Windows XP machines. That seems really wierd to me because...

Well, I should say all the caveats like "don't try this at home," and "it'll destroy your data," and "this is a stupid thing to do," and "don't try this with data you really need, use a professional data recovery service," but... At home I have a Windows...

The Japanese Calendar is labeled by the reign of the current emporer. Windows has supported 4 Japanese calendar Eras, however in the future there may be more eras. Realizing this, we've added support in Windows 7, Server 2008R2 & .Net v4 for additional...