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January 2007 - Posts

Info needed from developers and architects about what they are (or want to be) doing with MUI

You might remember when I was talking about how Thinking about MUI is making me bipolar . Well, I was given the news that the problem was investigated and verified, and some initial work went into determining what the fix might entail. However, there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 31, 2007 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

A year later, and the Vietnamese keyboard isn't any better

QTran asked via the Contact link: Michael, Install the Vietnamese keyboard on XPSP2, and guess what it didn't work very well. The major stumbling block for me is when I have to enter digits. You see, I am a touch-typist and to type a number I have to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Where is the character?

A common question I get relates to "how do I find a font for U+####[##]?" where the character code is whatever Unicode code unit they need to show. Like just the other day, the question I got: Hi Michael, when browsing for how to write the reversed C Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 31, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Not the coolest, but

The thing released today that I am going to talk about is not the coolest product that will be widely available starting today, January 30, 2007. It will not be used by as many people. It will not change as many lives. It is not localized into as many Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 5:34 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 50 Comments

What to do if she sees right through you

It is an old story. You have a word. A word like, for example, transparency . And it has a connotation that is somewhere between neutral (when used objectively, e.g. describing a window surface) and negative (when used subjectively, e.g. a soon-to-be Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Think of Windows as a hedonist

Windows has some time zone information stored in its innards. But Windows only lives in the now; it pays no attention to what was and what will be, even when it does know. In the words of George Carlin, I think I'll repeat that since since it seems vaguely Read More...
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007 5:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Whatever happened to ASMO, anyway?

So over the weekend, A. Skrobov asked in the Suggestion Box: What does ASMO stand for in the names of the Arabic-ASMO codepages? I've been googling for a while and still couldn't find any organization of this name. As far as I know, ASMO is an acronym Read More...
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007 2:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Stealth features (like language detection?)

Under discussion today are eight characters made famous in several prior posts : ş ( U+015f , LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CEDILLA) Ş ( U+015e , LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CEDILLA) ţ ( U+0163 , LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CEDILLA) Ţ ( U+0162 , LATIN CAPITAL Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 28, 2007 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Be careful what you wish for (just in case it comes true!) aka When a Cedilla needs to be a Comma Below (and vice versa)

It's funny how sometimes I'll have a blog post on my list of posts to write that, once I get down to writing it, ends up very different than I originally imagined. And then other times, it is pretty much exactly as I had constructed in my mind, perhaps Read More...
Posted Friday, January 26, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

If I were Australian I might say that Steve Jobs and the Klingon emporer were mates?

The other day Larry pointed out to me an article over on Macworld with an interesting little tidbit: And now for the answers to the three-point stunts. Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell created this challenge: Mac OS X supports a language invented Read More...
Posted Friday, January 26, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Is it Unicode or ANSI?

Legolas (no relation to the elf of the same name!) asked: Hi, I'd like to suggest something that may be in line with your recent 'convert to unicode' posts, although it's very specific, perhaps too specific. Anyway: for a print monitor, the function you Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Internet Explorer 7.0's language settings? This may be the last straw....

Over in the Suggestion Box, Mike (I think we all know which Mike that might be!) asks: The IE7 RunOnce page which is loaded after IE7 is installed gives users control over anti-phishing and accept-language settings etc. For some reason it sets the radio Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 25, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Thank Bob that there are no time machines!

In response to Raymond's What('s) a character! , Miral commented: This whole discussion is why I heartily wish that *all* WinAPIs, without exception, exclusively used a count of bytes and not characters or storage characters or whatever. I know, I know, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

Driving myself to a vacation from napalm

(Nothing technical in this post, whatsoever) Just a quick update on the MS situation, for those who are curious. :-) Well, first of all, I did get my driver's license after the retest (did better this time that I did the first time, technically!). I still Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007 2:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Sometimes a WCHAR really *is* just a character....

Yesterday in response to When is a character not a character? , reader Bart commented : Maybe you should write a post about how the concept of a character in the sense of wchar should be deprecated for uses other then datastorage or maybe a codepoint. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Vista really does turn on everything

Around the end of 2006, when I was explaining how Vista turns on everything , and I explained about how you could no longer turn off advanced text services in Vista, developer Kyle sent me some email to correct me on this point: Hi Michael, You probably Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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When is a character not a character?

The question that appeared in my inbox included a point that seemed worth posting about.... We are also facing some other problems like, there are some characters in the Keyboard layout that are not there in the Gujarati Unicode Range. Please find the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Confusion in the user interface can happen anywhere

After that post Strategic avoidance of stepping in a CrapFest , I realize I might have come off as a little snooty about UI stuff. I figured I should give my own story about the worst UI experience I have been involved with, just so people don't think Read More...
Posted Monday, January 22, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Getting all of the localized names of a font[.NET]

It was not quite a year ago that I delved into the OpenType standard to look into Getting all of the localized names of a font . If you are trying to solve the problem from .NET, it turns out the problem is a bit easier to solve since GDI+ is doing most Read More...
Posted Monday, January 22, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

For HKSCS, Vista ≫ 2004, and 2004 ≫ 2001

Back in May of 2005 when I posted More on 'repertoire fences' , I tried to describe how code pages were becoming less important for their own sake but more important to help define what was considered important in different parts of the world. I was reminded Read More...
Posted Friday, January 19, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

What do keyboards and socks NOT have in common?

It is an old nursery rhyme and it goes something like this: All around Microsoft Windows The programs added keyboards; Windows thought 'twas all in fun, but Pop goes the LangBar! Ok, I may have misremembered the words and misplaced a mulberry bush somewhere. Read More...
Posted Friday, January 19, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Even if it makes no sense it has to go somewhere

My first exposure to the Cyrillic script was back in the early 80s when I read Heinlein's Expanded Universe. He was talking about the trip that he and Ginny took to Russia, and about how half of the battle to learn Russian was in learning the script. Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 18, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

What the %$#& is up with localized paths in Vista?

You know, South Park was just on, it was the one where they wind up taking a bus to China for the world dodgeball championship. I was trying to decide whether it was a good thing or not that I recognized 野種 on the banner in the back of the gym even though Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 18, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 32 Comments

Ungarbling the comments

Sengottuvelu's question was: Hi Michal, we have visual basic 6.0 code. The code comments and code are all in japanese characters. we dont have japanese version of VB 6.0,so the japanese characters are all showing junk characters. i like to know is there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 17, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Insufficient documentation, revisited

Erzengel asks in the Suggestion Box: You mentioned "Third Party IMEs" in one of you blog posts. Are these actual IMEs that can be plugged into Windows and used in any program that supports IME? If so, where are some articles, etc, that would show how Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 17, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Tired, overused metaphors, a.k.a. Two rails forward, one rail back!

Remember when I talked about how The Unicode train is leaving the station ? and how I talked about the Unicode default Well, not to overtax a metaphor, but pointing out the two cool "rails" in that post ("by default" Unicode projects in C++, a resource Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 16, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Please excuse the interruption

Regular readers may remember that little mini crisis that happened with Tysabri last year that I posted about here and here . Anyway, Tysabri is back on track now. But that isn't what this post is about. I was reminded about all of the folks who had been Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

With SQL Server (and SQL itself) comes the illogic of 'trailing spaces' (and the myth of fixed width)

There is a problem with the notion of both trailing spaces and fixed width in SQL Server, when you are using Windows collations. I bring this up since I have a meeting this week where people will be talking about what are the differences between what Read More...
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

How long can it get?

Maybe you just have a dirty mind.... On the other hand perhaps I just need to get out more. I am thinking about the maximum length for strings in resources, myself. Especially after Nizam asked: Do we have a limit on the length of a resource string? Well, Read More...
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

'Where is the dictionary?' you might ask

Jonas Beckeman asks, both in the Suggestion Box and in the MSDN Forums (thread here ): --Common literals dictionary-- I've been told that there's no place in Windows where common literals are stored (e.g. localized strings for "OK", "Cancel", "Copy" etc), Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

The 'in' process for out of process keyboard work

The question that came in from zafer was: i have a problem to switch e.g. "notepad" keyboard layout with C# and interop WinAPI. If i used "ActiveKeyboardLayout" this switch only my application keyboard layout. I have writen a virtualkeyboard. In this Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 14, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Output on customer input on MSLU's ReadConsoleInputW

There is a bug in the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Win9x Systems in the ReadConsoleInput function. This was actually just recently reported for the very first time (that I have ever heard of) this last Novermber. The report from Ross Ridge in the MSLU Read More...
Posted Saturday, January 13, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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RichTextBox breaking ranks?

The other day someone noticed something about the WinForms RichTextBox . What he noticed was that the RichTextBox.SaveFile method, specifically the RichTextBox.SaveFile(String, RichTextBoxStreamType) overload, was not prepending the text file with a BOM Read More...
Posted Saturday, January 13, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

You've got to be kashidding me

I know that technically 'Kashidding' is not a word, but English is a productive language, yada yada yada, and it actually makes sense in the context of this post! The other day one of the developers on another team was looking at some of their text search Read More...
Posted Friday, January 12, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

When you can't depend on your Parent

Boy, that's a fun post title? :-) The other day , Aldo was curious about why I was so down on the Parent property, and he hazarded a guess that perhaps it was to do with the fact that it defaulted to the InvariantCulture for Windows only cultures.... Read More...
Posted Friday, January 12, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Having problems with MSLU?

The question from lonelyhawl was: I have create a unicode program in windows XP(using vs 2003) by method you have introduced. But it still can not run in windows 98, when it runs, it prompt a runtime error. I have rebuild the .lib files and replaced them Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Why we have both CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture

It was late last year that I got the following through the contact link: Michael, I have a question that might be of particular interest to you. You might be able to answer it in one of your 30 to 40 blog entries you'll post today or tomorrow. I'm taking Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

Two things that suck about CurrentUICulture, (Part 2, aka On judging a book by its cover)

Back in Part 1 of this two part series where I started talking about how there are Two things that suck about CurrentUICulture , I talked about the first thing -- the fact that the CultureInfo object is just way too big for the limited intended requirements Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 10, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Two things that suck about CurrentUICulture (Part 1, aka It's just too much!)

I have nothing against the CurrentUICulture . I do not picket it, stage protests aimed at it, arrange sit ins near it, plan acts of terrorism on it, architect wars of attrition against it, or ponder outright sd obliterate of its source. But I have to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 10, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

What happens to the old MUI in Vista?

Alan Adams asked in the Suggestion Box: You had mentioned getting to some more MUI API topics. One area I'm not finding much information on is whether and how well the choice of using (Vista-level) MUI support works for things like shell extensions. As Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The Phantom [Time] Zone

Last month, after I posted Sometimes when sorting the index is the last thing you want to use , in response to a question from Kevin Dente. I did receive another question after the discussion in the comments of that post: Hi Michael. Sorry to bug you, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 09, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Oceania doesn't document LOCALE_ITIMEMARKERUSE; Oceania has *never* documented LOCALE_ITIMEMARKERUSE

(apologies for the odd 1984 reference!) This time it was International MVP Ted who led me (kicking and screaming) over to the MSDN Forums to answer a question asked by Phrediac: I don't know it this is the right place to post - if not apologies. Can anyone Read More...
Posted Monday, January 08, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Using without registering [the source code]

(Boy, take out the bracketed piece of the title and it sounds almost sordid!) I believe I have mentioned the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class before. It is the programmatic way to create custom cultures in the >= 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, Read More...
Posted Monday, January 08, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Buraian boitano nara dousuru?

Localization can be a very diffcult task. Now add to that the burden of trying to provide a translated version of a movie via voice dubbing and it only gets harder.... Let's look for a moment at Frankthesaiyan 's efforts provide a Japanese version of Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 07, 2007 3:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

On trimming the [Unicode] whitespace...

The System.String.Trim() method is documented as: Removes all leading and trailing white-space characters from the current String object. Let's test theory out, shall we? using System; using System.Globalization; namespace Testing { class TrimTest { [STAThread] Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 07, 2007 1:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Mixing it up with bidirectional text

So the question that Ziv asked was: Hi, I’m trying to display both English and Hebrew text in a single WinForms RichTextBox. Basically, the user types a string in one RichTextBox control (in either languages) and I’m appending it to the contents of another Read More...
Posted Saturday, January 06, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Sorting The Old New Thing All Out

A couple of months ago I got a phone call from someone at Addison-Wesley who wanted to send me some books. They ended up sending me two of them right away (more on those to another day) but the third didn't show up because a week before someone else from Read More...
Posted Saturday, January 06, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Converting a project to Unicode: Part 9 (The project's postpartum postmortem)

Previous posts in this series (including today's!): Part 0 (The introduction) Part 1 (Business before pleasure) Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?) Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?) Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!) Read More...
Posted Friday, January 05, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

How can be changed the keyboard layout name label?

Regular reader from Romania Christian Secara asks: How can be changed the keyboard layout names, the ones from the tray icon for example, from a programmatic point of view ? After installing LIP or MUI, the keyboard layout names have translated names, Read More...
Posted Friday, January 05, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Converting a project to Unicode: Part 8 (Fitting MSLU into the mix)

Previous posts in this series (including today's!): Part 0 (The introduction) Part 1 (Business before pleasure) Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?) Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?) Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!) Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 04, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Whither intl.inf in Vista?

Regular reader Ivan Petrov asked in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael, I've two questions for you: 1) What happened with the 'intl.inf' file in Windows Vista? and 2) Where has disappeared most of its content? Regards, Ivan. Now Ivan has been asking questions Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 04, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Converting a Project to Unicode: Part 7 (What does it mean to fit things to a 'T', anyway?)

Previous posts in this series (including today's!): Part 0 (The introduction) Part 1 (Business before pleasure) Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?) Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?) Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

UTF-8 and GB18030 are both 'NT' code pages, they just aren't 'ANSI' code pages

Michael Entin asks in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael. I want to revisit UTF-8 discussion. In several posts you wrote that it is impossible to support UTF-8 as NT code page, since there is a lot of legacy code that assumes maximum of 2 bytes per char. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Converting a Project to Unicode: Part 6 (Upon the road not traveled)

Previous posts in this series (including today's!): Part 0 (The introduction) Part 1 (Business before pleasure) Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?) Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?) Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 02, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Right behavior, wrong scenario

So the other day when I posted By design? Well, not beautifully so.... it was nice to see that Aaron Stebner posted on some of the underlying setup issues behind it in his post Why .NET Framework 2.0 language packs will not install correctly on Windows Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 02, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Converting a Project to Unicode: Part 5 (Are we there yet? Well, not *just* yet)

Previous posts in this series (including today's!): Part 0 (The introduction) Part 1 (Business before pleasure) Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?) Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?) Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!) Read More...
Posted Monday, January 01, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Report of an IME that splits and separates more Hangul by 9 am than most IMEs do all day

(apologies for the title; I fought it for days, but it just kind of had its way with me and refused to back down!) The question that came in the other day: ok, i read about your theory thing about Hangul, and i was actually having a trouble with installing Read More...
Posted Monday, January 01, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
 
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