I'm not a Klingon ( )

[Updated Mar 30 2007: Mike pointed out errors which I've corrected] Many applications are "still" ANSI and can't handle Unicode. We (Microsoft) have even released non-Unicode applications reasonably recently. even though we should know better. In particular...

There's an unfortunate Windows Vista bug that causes keyboards to fail in ANSI applications. Its amusing in a sad sort of way since this bug missed about a dozen checks we have to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen. Anyway, keyboards attached...

WARNING: If you do any of the things in this blog you could end up with majorly messed up data, an unusable system, or both. Nothing mentioned here is recommended or supported by Microsoft or myself. At the very least if you encode data with a non-standard...

Disclaimer: This is mostly my conjecture, so I could be completely wrong about some of this, but it seems plausible to me. I’m aiming for the general concepts here, not to start a discussion about the specific details of the history of code pages. ...

(Note that this happened before I started owning code pages, so I might be a bit confused about parts of this). Support for HKSCS is now through Unicode 5. There's a download available, Microsoft Character Code Conversion Routines For HKSCS-2004 ,...

A blog post I saw recently ( A .Net Unicode Puzzle ) reminded me of a sample we'd written for the .Net Framework Samples. " Fallback Encoding Application Sample " demonstrates the Encoding/Decoding and Fallback classes, using the various APIs provided...

In Whidbey (Microsoft.Net v2.0), DateTime.Parse() throws an exception if the date separator is a space. This was fixed in future QFEs, including the Whidbey Vista release, so you'll only see this on XP, 2003, etc and not on Vista. This is fixed in...

Our spam filters here are pretty good, but every once in a while I get a spam mail offers to sell me Vista or Office for only $20 or so. Now I know the pirates aren't too smart, but if they're trying to sell pirated versions of Vista for $20, why are...