I'm not a Klingon ( )

A user asked how to make the first day of the week on the Vista Calendar gadget a Monday because they're from Bulgaria and used to Monday as the first day of the week. (Personally I think Sundays a strange "1st" day too, but that's a digression) The...

[10 July 2007] The security patch of 10 July 2007 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms07-040.mspx changes culture names to use the new names on Windows XP/2003/2000 as well as Vista. In order to conform to RFC 4646 (replaces RFC 3066...

We're working on a tool, the Microsoft Locale Builder, for Windows Vista to help users create their own custom locales. This will help those users that need a tool rather than a managed API to create a custom locale. I'll post a link to the public...

Several people have noticed that Calendar.GetWeekOfYear() is almost like the ISO 8601 week when passed CalendarWeekRule.FirstFourDayWeek and DayOfWeek.Monday , however it is a little bit different. Specifically ISO 8601 always has 7 day weeks. If the...

Use custom keyboards, locales, fonts and font linking to create a solution for complex custom locales. I use the made-up Klingon language and pIqad script for my example....

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...

Windows Vista and .Net 2.0 support custom locales. A couple days ago Michael mentioned to me that people were wondering when someone would actually replace a built-in locale. For new custom locales, its fairly easy to see why people would want to make...

[12 July 2007] Updated with culture names on list of effected cultures The .Net patch of July 10th, ms07-049 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms07-040.mspx , changes culture names to use the new names on Windows XP/2003/2000 as well...

[NOTE: 31 July 2007, the tool is available again at its new URL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e4588c5e-8f21-45cc-b862-38df8d9bd528&displaylang=en ] The Microsoft Locale Builder Tool Beta 2 is now available for download...

We've changed the culture names for the .Net Framework in Windows Vista to match the locale names used in Vista, which were changed to be more like the IETF standard names. Previously .Net Framework 2.0 culture names looked like "language"-"country" or...

Previously I wrote about the Best Way to Make Your Own Encoding , but didn't include an example, so today I'm including an example of a replacement Encoding. I also included an EncoderFallback example, which replaces unknown characters with numerical...

[10 July 2007] The recent security patch to .Net changed the behavior on other Windows versions as well (XP, 2003, 2000). If your application still requires the old names this workaround might work for you. In order to follow RFC 4646 more closely...

Windows and the .Net Framework have the concept of "best-fit" behavior for code pages and encodings. Best fit can be interesting, but often its not a good idea. In WideCharToMultiByte() this behavior is controlled by a WC_NO_BEST_FIT_CHARS flag. In .Net...

Someone asked about adding the "Olson" database of timezones to Windows, and I learned about tzedit.exe and the registry keys. Tzedit.exe is a simple tool that allows you to add or edit the time zone registry entries, which live in the registry at HKLM...

A common code snippet that I see is something that uses binary data as a String, something like: String myHash = "abcd\xD800"; String encrypted = Encoding.Default.GetString(byte[] encryptedData); encryptor.bytes[] = Encoding.Default.GetBytes("my key...

Here're some custom locale examples in various formats (1.8 MB .zipped download). These are to be used at your own risk. They are basically locales I used for testing and playing around with. They probably have serious errors and were basically selected...

With Windows Vista and Microsoft .Net 2.0 (MS07-040 security patch) and 3.0+, we've started to use the IETF standard "zh-Hans", and "zh-Hant" names for Chinese simplified and traditional. In windows the zh-CHS/zh-CHT names were never used because the...

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'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...

A helpful reader pointed out I don't really know Klingon. PS. I just checked out your blog (very nice by the way, lots of stuff I need to read) and I noticed along the top of the page you have  (jItlhInganbe') for "I'm not a Klingon"....

We have some "best-fit" behavior which we generally consider to be "bad". Any loss of data is generally a bad thing, so we recommend storing data in Unicode (so you don't lose anything). Assuming you can't use Unicode, why is it so bad to just make everything...

(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 ,...

Martin recently asked what the best way to roll his own encoding in .Net 2.0, in particular can you override Encoding/Encoder/Decoder, or should he write his own StreamWriter. #1 is, of course, to use Unicode :), but apparently Martin doesn't have...

Some people have used custom locales/custom cultures successfully and others are finding scenarios that don't work. Feel free to comment about what scenarios work/don't work for you. I'll try to update this when I learn about new scenarios. Limitations...

[Updated 11 Aug 2006 to reflect IETF style locale names] This is just a simple example of creating a custom culture from an LDML file. The LDML file has to have Microsoft specific tags otherwise you will get some errors for the missing data. The resulting...