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October 2005 - Posts

Heading off to the UTC...

Yes, that's right. I am at zero bugs for the milestone and heading to Adobe in San Jose for the Unicode Technical Committee meeting, a quarterly gathering that goes through changes, additions, updates, and technical reports for the Unicode Standard. I'll Read More...
Posted Monday, October 31, 2005 8:29 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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To Ex or not to Ex? THAT is the question.

(Although the title may suggest it to some people, this is not a post about whether I should be giving my ex-girlfriend a call; it is not!) There are many functions in the Windows API set that have Ex or Ex-style varations that get added. In lots of cases, Read More...
Posted Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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Julie Bennet is on Charmed!

Yes, it is true. Julie Bennet has made an appearance on the TV show Charmed ! (note the way it is spelled, that is not a typo!) Ah, we probably are thinking of two different people. I was noticing that in the big identity shift at the end of last season Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 30, 2005 5:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Getting on people's case

It is funny how you can't have a simple discussion about the Framework Design Guidelines about Case Sensitivity without bringing out a nearly religious hysteria with the two camps claiming their thoughts on the matter are best. Personally, I don't care. Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 30, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Why an 8-hour day seems to take forever

Yoshihiro kawabata asked the suggestion box: Hello, Michael. About U+221E. I test this code in SQL Server 2005. select convert(varchar, nchar(0x221E)) Result: '8' Collation(Latin1_General_CI_AS). '∞' Collation(Japanese_CI_AS). Why U+221E is convert to Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 29, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Karaoke, huh?

I'm sure if you have been reading blogs on http://blogs.msdn.com/ that you have been reading about the Giving campaign. I probably do not get in to all of the activities that people like to do during this time (as much as some people do), but I found Read More...
Posted Friday, October 28, 2005 11:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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ISCII code pages as Windows ANSI code pages?

In Windows 2000, support for several of the ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange) code pages was added to Windows: ISCII Assamese 57006 ISCII Bengali 57003 ISCII Devanagari 57002 ISCII Gujarathi 57010 ISCII Kannada 57008 ISCII Malayalam Read More...
Posted Friday, October 28, 2005 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

What is wrong with that web page?

The other day, my manager's manager's manager Delan was looking at various web sites and on one of them there was an unusual display issue on several pages. Basically, each of the pages in question had text on them that looked like this: "?/font>" Read More...
Posted Friday, October 28, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

It isn't Unicode, it's Double Secret Unicode!

Visual Basic ≤ 6.0 has Unicode strings. But as I point out in Chapter 6 of my book, it converts out of Unicode to the default system code page any time you do just about anything to those strings. Lots of people try to avoid this by calling the StrConv Read More...
Posted Friday, October 28, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Not every bit of the printer dialogs support MUI 100% of the time

You can use the PrintDlg and PrintDlgEx functions to show the Print Dialog Box and Print Property Sheet , respectively. And these dialogs have full support for MUI in that they will do the right thing for your UI language in Windows (though not for the Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 27, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

The WinForms Common Dialogs do not support culture settings

If you go back to March of this year, I post about how the WinForms DateTimePicker and MonthCalendar do not support culture settings . But if you look at the text, you will see how I had my 'NLS eyes' on, thinking about CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 27, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Does Visual Studio rot the mind?

Mike pointed me at this article by Charles Petzold entitled Does Visual Studio rot the mind? Based on a talk he gave for the NY .NET Developer's Group, here is the abstract: Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 3:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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U+0080 is not the Euro!

Regular reader Maurits asked: The "official" euro is U+20AC http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20ac/index.htm But U+0080... while officially is a "control character"... has a strikingly familiar image: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0080/index.htm Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

For those who enjoy mathematics (or, 'Also new in Vista')

Another one of those "new in Vista" posts. :-) Unicode has added a great deal to support mathematics, from Unicode Technical Report 25 ( Unicode Support for Mathematics ) to the various Mathematical subranges in Unicode (see the Mathematical Symbols column Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

Getting currency names

Warren asked me (via the contact link): First, I'd like to say I enjoy reading your blog. Second, I've got a question about retrieving currency names. I'd like it if you could answer my question (if the solution is even possible). If it's not possible, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 25, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Another new blog to check out

This one is titled fontblog and is a team blog for that other (non-GIFT) font team, known officially as the ART (Advanced Reading Technologies) team. Worth a definite look if you are interested in typography issues. Of course I will keep covering stuff Read More...
Posted Monday, October 24, 2005 6:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Searching for supplementary characters

Bruce Rusk asked in the microsoft.public.word.international.features newsgroup: I seem to have stumbled across a bug in Word's (I have 2003 on XP Pro English) handling of certain Unicode ranges in searches. I have the extended Chinese font SimSun (Founder Read More...
Posted Monday, October 24, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Keyboards as security blankets

Dr. International recently posted about using alternate keyboard characters as a method of enhancing security . I am of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, any method you use that makes it harder for password checkers is potentially interesting, Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 23, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Parameter confusion #2a

It was just ages ago that I talked about Parameter Confusion in regard to the LCMapString function when used for sort keys, and Parameter Confusion in regard to GetLocaleInfo when numbers were returned. Perhaps it just seems that way. Of course I forgot Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Parameter confusion #2

It seems like it was just ages ago that I talked about Parameter Confusion in regard to the LCMapString function when used for sort keys. Oh wait, it was just yesterday. :-) There is another direction in which the confusion can exist, though -- this time Read More...
Posted Friday, October 21, 2005 11:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 4 (What about Jet?)

Prior posts in this series: Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 0 (HISTORY) Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 1 (the broad strokes) Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 2 (generating sort keys) Read More...
Posted Friday, October 21, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

It is our most modest receptacle....

(nothing whatsoever that is technical in this post) I went to Rose Hill Animal Hospital for one of the most depressing errands I have had to run in quite some time. I had to pick up Chelsea's remains. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately given how depressing Read More...
Posted Friday, October 21, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Parameter confusion

The LCMapString function looks like it ought to have a clear and unambiguous meaning for its parameters. Look at the prototype: int LCMapString( LCID Locale, // locale identifier DWORD dwMapFlags, // mapping transformation type LPCTSTR lpSrcStr, // source Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 20, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Behold the PersianCalendar class

Not too long ago, someone pointed me at a Channel 9 thread asking about Writing a new jalaali calendar(System.Calendar) class .net 1.1 . I think I have pointed out in the past many of the flaws in the unmanaged , unmanaged , and managed calendar support Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 20, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

How to get at Jet warnings that are not errors

(this article is reconstituted from several different tips I wrote for publications, years ago) VB, VBA, and .NET for that matter work on an exception based model for error handling (in VB and VBA they are called errors but they are implemented as exceptions, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 19, 2005 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Small typo in the documentation

If you look at the NumberFormatInfo.PercentNegativePattern property in the pre-2.0 version of the .NET Framework, it has a limited number of items: Value Associated Pattern 0 -n % 1 -n% 2 -%n If you look at the 2.0 property, it has been expanded a bit! Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 19, 2005 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Locales should be stable but should never stand still

The title of this post is a definite nod to the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., quote about the law. And of course in the case of language, using it as a directive is about at the level of legislation that matches the value of Pi or the existence of gravity, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 19, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Font Linking vs. Font Fallback, #2

Last January, I talked about Keeping it simple with complex scripts , and more recently I talked about Font Linking vs. Font Fallback . One of the most important parts of that post was a quoting of the rules of what makes a script complex according to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 18, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

How best to alter case

Yesterday when I talked about Comparing Unicode file names the right way , Mike Dunn asked the following question: When using LCMapString to do the uppercasing, what's the right LCID to use? LOCALE_INVARIANT? The CharUpperBuff docs say it "uses the language Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 18, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Comparing Unicode file names the right way

Michael Brown asked the following question in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international: What is the correct way to compare two unicode filenames to see if they would end up referring to the same file? I'm trying to merge several filename lists Read More...
Posted Monday, October 17, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Round trip calls do not always go both ways

A few days ago, Someone with the handle of MorningSunShine asked in the newsgroups: I used WideCharToMultiByte() a lot to convert unicode characters to multibyte chars back and forth. However, when the unicode is between 0x3400 and 0x4dff, it failed to Read More...
Posted Monday, October 17, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

A reset does not mean everything was thrown away

When we hit the reset button for a video game, we do not throw away the game. We do not forget what we have learned, either. I thought about this very very recently.... Dare Obasanjo reposted a comment to mini-Microsoft that makes me wonder why the whole Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 16, 2005 1:39 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Not all stroke counts are created equal

One of the problems with sort weights that had to fixed in Vista is the various stroke count sorts. You see, everyone wanted to add more ideographs, but the original weights left no room for additions. So there was no way to add them and still have them Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 16, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

If you are using INVARIANT then you are probably MISusing it, #1

(I am putting a #1 at the end of the title because I think this is going to be a recurring theme....) Maybe you remember the original post from December of last year -- Where is the locale? "Its Invariant." In where ? Or maybe your introduction was in Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

You'd think the two teams were communicating...

The other day, Murtuza Shakir (an SDET on the Office team here at Microsoft) asked: GetLocaleInfo accepted LOCALE_SLANGUAGE and returned the localized name. Is there something similar for CultureInfo in System.Globalization? The LOCALE_SLANGUAGE lctyps Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

My caption would have been....

Of course I was too late to get involved in the contest to come up with a caption to describe what Steve Ballmer is doing in this picture... Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 8:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The mission of GIFT

In a comment to my post a few days ago, Nick Lamb suggested : Is it true then that U+005c looks different (as in, it looks like ¥) on Japanese Windows systems? If so, isn't it key to GIFT's mission to deliver replacement fonts that fix this issue (shouldn't Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Let there be LIPs

Many years ago I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show entirely too many times at the now-closed Coventry theatre (I think it was in Mayfield Heights?). I still remember the very beginning of the audience participation: We chant "Lips...lips...lips..." and Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 21 Comments
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Syntax Savvy dictionaries?

Carlos asked (in the suggestion box): I don't know if this falls within your purview, but it seems like it would at least be a tangent. I'd like to find out why the spell check dictionary couldn't be a just little more savvy about how language operates. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 14, 2005 12:28 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Searching encoded strings in SQL Server 2000?

A guy named Michael (who is not me) asked the following question in the Suggestion Box: Is it possible to search an NVARCHAR column containing string data encoded in a number of different encoding types? I'm dealing with iso-8859-15, big5, utf-8, iso-8859-1, Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 13, 2005 11:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

I'd rather call it the path separator

I am talking about the reverse solidus, U+005c (also known as the backslash to some). It is even known as the "whack" to others (when some people talk about UNC paths, they will say 'whack whack servername' when they mean \\servername ). I am sure you Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Some of GetGeoInfo is sorta broken

Remember back when I was going on in time zones and locations and keyboards about how we could use GEOID values for everything? And then Mihai helped me realize that GEOID support is not quite done ? Well, we were digging into things again and realized Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

The Ten Commandments of MS Access references

I am doing a presentation tonight for the Access SIG here in Redmond, the official title is References Available Upon Request . If you are here in Redmond, it will be at 6:30pm tonight in Building 34 in the Quinault room. It should be a lot of fun (especially Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 11:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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I love a good typography joke

The title says it all -- I love a good typography joke! Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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How to know whether to go with the old or the new?

I believe I have mentioned before (perhaps in passing) about how WinForms 2.0 is not locked into using GDI+ for it text rendering. This is really a good thing since the GDI+ text shaping engines have not been updated for some time, and every new lanaguage Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Miss Manners probably did not cover this one

I am pretty sure that Miss Manners probably did not cover this one in her column. Let us say that I am scooting around in one of my scooters, and I have to enter a building. Let us further say that the building has one of those handy automatic door openers, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 11, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 19 Comments
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426 e-mails

Apparently, my existing home mortgage is very impressive. Because starting in June of this year I have been getting a lot of e-mail claiming that it makes me eligible for a decreased rate (as of midnight 4/26!). What makes my mortgage most impressive Read More...
Posted Monday, October 10, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Console attributes that only relate to CJK

Back in February of this year, KJK::Hyperion asked: Michael, do you happen to know what these console character attributes are _really_ for? COMMON_LVB_LEADING_BYTE COMMON_LVB_TRAILING_BYTE COMMON_LVB_GRID_HORIZONTAL COMMON_LVB_GRID_LVERTICAL COMMON_LVB_GRID_RVERTICAL Read More...
Posted Monday, October 10, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Hangul Day / Han'gŭl Day / Hangeul Day / 한글날 !

People still may not all agree about what to call it, like I said back in Is it Hangul? or Hangeul? or Han'gŭl? or what? But today is the day we can remember the actions of King Sejong the Great, the creator of Hangeul (maybe we should just say 한글 and Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 09, 2005 12:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 3 (THAT CLASS)

Prior posts in this series: Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 0 (HISTORY) Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 1 (the broad strokes) Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 2 (generating sort keys) Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 09, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Disclaimer required?

Law & Order, a television show that is now in its 16th season, is one that I have pretty much watched since it first came on the air. Many people have theorized as to why the show has lasted as long as it has, but one of the reasons given in the show's Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 09, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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MSI Databases and Unicode?

Yesterday, Heath Stewart posted about MSI Databases and Code Pages and it took me right back to when I was working on MSKLC . You see, we wanted a nice easy setup that would install the keyboards people would create without making them buy a product. Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 08, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

It's in Spanish? What kind?

Yesterday, John Yunker posted about how there are More Reasons to Localize for the US Hispanic Market : According to a recent study by Feedback Research of online consumers who lived in the US, spoke Spanish at home and/or used Spanish media regularly: Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 08, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

The 8.0 instructions for rebuilding MFC and the CRT

With Visual Studio 2005 almost completely done, I figured it was time to send the updated instructions. You can find them right here . For prior versions, see this article (note that I added the updated link). Be sure to also read Rebuilding MFC/CRT and Read More...
Posted Friday, October 07, 2005 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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It does not always pay to be compatible

A few months ago, someone emailed me about some trouble they were having with their Arabic keyboard that had created with MSKLC . They were confused about the fact that none of the letters seemedd to ever shape. I asked them to send me the .KLC file so Read More...
Posted Friday, October 07, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

I will stipulate that 64-bit is the future

In the past week, I have had three different people ask me about MSKLC and x64 support, the most recent from a colleague just down the hall from me. I figured it might be time to explain a bit further than I did in this post . So here goes.... Let us Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 06, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

I ask the cat-goddess Bubastis...

I had to put down my cat Chelsea last night. Those of you who read this blog may have been following her story . But, in the true spirit of Seattle weather predictions, her passing that was judged to be little more than 30 days from the diagnosis actually Read More...
Posted