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April 2007 - Posts

Giving Yi the weight it deserves

Bob Eaton asked over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup: I'm trying to compare two Yi Unicode-encoded strings using lstrcmp (which underlyingly uses CompareString). But when I compare the two strings, lstrcmp always returns Read More...
Posted Monday, April 30, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

When moving to from XslTransform to XslCompiledTransform...

Marco asked: Given a XSLT stylesheet with the following element: <xsl:output method="html" encoding="Windows-1252"/> NET Framework 1.1 System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransform.Transform method outputs: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252"> Read More...
Posted Monday, April 30, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

A way better model for features, part 3 (a.k.a. downlevel LoadMUILibrary)

You may have seen part 1 and part 2 of this series. Here we are with part 3! Pavel S. Tsarevskiy asked last month over in the microsoft.public.win32.prograsmmer.international newsgroup: I have a problem with using LoadMUILibrary() function and MUI technology Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 29, 2007 2:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

_wsetlocale doesn't support Unicode-only locales

There are many people who are writing code in C/C++ who try to use the more portable CRT functions rather than the Win32 ones. Since in many cases the CRT functions actually wrap the Win32 functions when you run on Windows anyway, this approach allows Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 29, 2007 11:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

What type to use for code page values

I was asked via the Contact link: Why does CharPrevExA/CharNextExA take a WORD for code page, whereas MultiByteToWideChar takes a UINT? Which type should I use to store code pages? It is true that CharNextExA and CharPrevExA take WORD values for code Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 29, 2007 12:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Testing MSLU

I had someone ask me the other day what kind of testing was done for MSLU. I told him that the whole project was an interesting example of how the places you expect to find bugs are fine while the places you think are fun have many bugs! As a starting Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 28, 2007 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

When the system locale is the display language

Björn pointed out a new take on the system locale (a.k.a. the Language for non-Unicode Programs) in Vista, from the help: Now compared to the confusion people hit in Windows 2000 and even in Windows XP/Server 2003 , it seems nice to see the area covered Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Characters, now half off!

Vivek's question over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup really confused me: What is the sizeof wchar_t / WCHAR on WIN64 platforms? Is it 4 bytes and UTF32 or same as WIN32 -- 2 bytes and UTF16? I wasn't confused due to not Read More...
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007 8:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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'The 44' (*not* 'The 4400')

The 4400 is an interesting television show that this post has nothing to do with. This post is about what happens if you run the script from No Regex in the Unicode room! (and no sex in the champagne room, either!) on a Vista machine. Basically, you will Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007 3:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

No Regex in the Unicode room! (and no sex in the champagne room, either!)

(apologies to Chris Rock for the title!) Ted first sent me mail years ago, he was asking some questions about MSLU and Julie (who knew Ted back from when he was working for Microsoft) sent him to me. If memory serves he actually pointed out an interesting Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Sprechen Sie IME?

The other day, Keith asked in the Suggestion Box: In creating an on screen keyboard for Korean, I began to notice that the Korean IME seems to do things differently than, say, the Japanese IME. In Japanese, to get the characters from the ToUnicodeEx function Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The nature of OrdinalIgnoreCase vs. intuitive expectations

A while back Patrick asked me: Hi Michael, Please forward if you’re not the right person to ask the question… Let’s say I have the following code snippet. int comparison = String.Compare( x, y, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase); if (comparison Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007 8:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Building your own better Ordinal comparison

OK, I previously talked about the problem with Ordinal comparisons and one of the more uncool suggested ways around the problem . So what is a potential better way to approach the problem? Well, if we take the simplified model of the Ordinal comparison Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Maybe it was registry rumination

One of the things that MSKLC does in its installation packages is add the necessary registry key and related values to support the keyboard layout on the machine. These are the ones under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts . Anyway, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Don't forget to reboot, please

I was told about the cause behind an interesting bug a few hours ago. The behavior: A crash in managed code running on Server 2003 with the following call stack: System.ArgumentException: Culture ID 2155 (0x086B) is not a supported culture. Parameter Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 24, 2007 7:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Sometimes, the shortcuts give better AND faster results

Just because you build up a huge architecture plan for a software plan doesn't mean that you can't use a sensible shortcut or optimization from time to time. Like for example, MSLU was set up to "speak Unicode" with its callers and "speak ANSI" with the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 24, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Popping the stack on the problem with using ordinal type comparisons?

About a week ago I was talking about The problem with using ordinal (a.k.a. lexicographic, a.k.a. binary) type comparisons and I mentioned that I talk about it a bit tomorrow. Well, it was one of those newfangled tomorrows that happen about a week later.... Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 24, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

How long is it in the console?

The width of a string in the console can be a tricky question to calculate. So earlier today when Eugene asked: What is the right way to figure out how many columns on a console will be needed to display a Unicode string? I believe wcwidth does that for Read More...
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007 1:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

EUDC does not require ADMIN

An interesting question came up the other day in relation to EUDC (which I have talked about before ): Hi,ALL I have a question about installation of "Private Character Fonts " using "users authorization". Currently my customer uses windows XP and users Read More...
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007 11:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The Notepad encoding detection issues keep coming up

A few days ago, Raymond was talking about the Notepad file encoding problem , again. And the comments were pretty funny, like watching a traffic accident as people started going off the rails in all kinds of directions. For the record, here is the official, Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 22, 2007 6:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

A geek can't always get a date, but the date statement sure can get to a geek

The question that was asked to the popular alias about Win32 development: We’ve got a stubborn machine on which a CMD window opened by the user emits date /t as “Thu 04/19/2007” whereas when Visual Studio 2005 runs a .cmd file from a build-step, date Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 21, 2007 12:43 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Those keyboard layout DLLs are *not* the hardware

People will, even now, tend to confuse the keyboard hardware with the keyboard software. (ref: this post and this one, for starters) After installing MSKLC and using it, they will wonder why their installed layout does not show up on the hardware list Read More...
Posted Friday, April 20, 2007 10:09 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Search and ye shall find, SIAO style!

Funny how you can discover something that changes nothing about you yet somehow makes it all look different. I was looking for a link over on MSDN and noticed something fun. Look at the search for MultiByteToWideChar, right here . My post A few of the Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Is CharNextExA broken?

Jochen Kalmbach asks over in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael! Short question: Is "CharNextExA" broken in XP (or generally borken)? It does not recognize UTF8... Here is a small example: #include <windows.h> #include <tchar.h> #include <stdio.h> Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007 4:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

A picture that can't be easily described with words

If only you could include screen shots in Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. I mean, could you imagine being in Product Support and trying to write up the text description for the following for a KB article? Actually, a customer named Pavel had the same Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Will the real orthography please rise? (HINT: they should all stand up)

(In the interests of avoding Uighur/Uyghur discussions, I will use Uyghur for the rest of the post!) There is a table that appears in a few Wikipedia articles (such as this one and this one ), and when you look at the table, at the ULY effort in general, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2007 12:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Providing developers a Unicolonic in unmanaged code?

Over in the Suggestion Box, zvi k asks: Hello, I tried to use MultiByteToWideChar() function to convert UTF-16 encoded string and it failed. Is it designed to get only ANSI / UTF-8 code or it can get UTF-16 format with special parameters? (I accent - Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The problem with using ordinal (a.k.a. lexicographic, a.k.a. binary) type comparisons?

The reason why these comparisons are popular is not because they make sense. The order, in fact, when based on code point value (as most implementations are), is an entirely arbitrary and non-intuitive side effect of the place in which characters are Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

In case of conflict, dump the indexes! (a.k.a. A day in the life of Jet)

You may not use Microsoft Access much, and if you do use Access you may not use DAO much. So if you want to skip this post you should feel free to do so. :-) Here is some code: Sub WhatAreYouTryingToProveAnyway() Dim db As DAO.Database Dim rs As DAO.Recordset Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Before jumping into the stream, you might want to peek at it

Chris asked: I am using the following constructor for StreamReader: StreamReader (String, Boolean) Initializes a new instance of the StreamReader class for the specified file name, with the specified byte order mark detection option. However, when I look Read More...
Posted Monday, April 16, 2007 7:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Which one has the astigmatism?

We've been talking about DPI a whole bunch, including not disabling and disabling the high DPI support in Vista. These two screen shots taken on a machine with 192 DPI will not show the final word (that comes in another post, soon!), but they will provide Read More...
Posted Monday, April 16, 2007 3:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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If you find that GetLocaleInfo is driving you crazy, it may not be the right function to use

Aaron asks (via the Contact link): I apologize for this totally unsolicited email, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm crazy or not. I'm using GetLocaleInfo to determine what language the user wants their UI strings displayed in. I'm using LOCALE_SISO639LANGNAME Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Rhymes with Amharic #5 (a.k.a. [Sub]setting up this code where it can do the most good?)

I may never be entirely used to working for Microsoft, as opposed to working with Microsoft products.... One of the things Scott Hanselman suggested yesterday in response to this whole series about font embedding in a managed application (prior posts Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

(see also parts 1 , 2 , and 3 ) OK, we are getting close to the end of this little mini-series.... First there was a comment from Dennis E. Hamilton asking about the DPI in the screen shots of that first post: I notice two things here. First, the impact Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 6:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Rhymes with Amharic #3 (a.k.a. Read and write a language w/o even getting out of my [em]bed? Kewl!)

(see also the first part and the second part) We now have that binary chunk that needs to be loaded, so let's go ahead and load it! The core bit of the code for this should have been: if (File.Exists(FONTNAME)) { // We are reading in the embed file info Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 2:26 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Rhymes with Amharic #2 (a.k.a. Before you embed, you have build something to embed)

(see here for the first part) The first part of the code centers around a call to TTEmbedFont . It only runs on Vista and above (since no one else should have the font on their machine!): IntPtr hDC = CreateDC("DISPLAY", IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero); Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 9:22 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Rhymes with Amharic (a.k.a. How about a little breakfast embed, dear?)

I have a lot of ideas for blog posts that are on my generic "to do" list. In fact, any time someone suggests a potential topic these days, I already had the topic on my list of things to cover some day.... I was looking at my blog summary page a moment Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 12:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

I don't want you to go

(Absolutely positively nothing technical, whatsoever) My grandmother said those words as I stood in the kitchen, about to head out to the car taking me to the airport. Of course I still had to go. I had been in Ohio a week, probably one of the longest Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 12:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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The three stages of grief^H^H^H^H^Hcollation

Just as there are stages to grief, it seems there are stages to support of collation in both product and platform.... STAGE #1: IGNORANCE (a.k.a. Denial) This first stage has one just going and doing as one pleases, adding language sorts and fixing bugs Read More...
Posted Friday, April 13, 2007 3:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

ESE is still not so easy for me!

Koushal asks via the contact link: Hi Michael, How you doin? I found your reply to a post regarding the steps to be followed and APIs to be used to get a list of tables in a .edb file using ESE APIs. You've written that you are not providing the sample Read More...
Posted Friday, April 13, 2007 2:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The seven is not being crossed out

The question in the microsoft.public.word.international.features newsgroup was: In Europe the handwritten number seven has a short horizontal line through it. My question: Is there any Word 2007 or Vista system font that allows one to type such a European-style Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Can you really say international support is irreplaceable?

Well, here is my logic. The System.String class has many members that support the current culture by default, and other cultures/comparison types by parameter. You know, like string.Compare and so on. But there is one member that does not have this behavior, Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007 4:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Microsoft is not uncaron^H^Hing about the issue!

Sometimes, in order get the best results in collation, one has to use constructs that from a linguistic or a Unicode general category standpoint might seem incorrect. A good example is times that a character which is not on the list of Mn (Mark, Nonspacing) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 11, 2007 8:48 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

WinNT keyboard file source?

Yesterday's Win9x keyboard file source? kind of anticipates this post, I suppose. But it is happier news, at least. :-) The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) has both information on keyboard layouts on NT-based platforms and the build-able source and header files Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 11, 2007 7:37 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Win9x keyboard file source?

Thorsten Glaser asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hi, thanks for MSKLC, now I'm able to have the same keyboard layout on the BSD wscons (text mode) console, under X-Window and on Windows NT/2k/… – with a “meta” key that just adds 0x80 to the value of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2007 7:08 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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When methods use collation to 'disturb the peace' we charge them with being 'out of sorts'

You know how I talk about best practices here sometimes? And the worst ways to misuse various globalization/internationalization methods and functions? Well, believe it or not, sometimes even the Microsoft code gets it wrong. (Gasp!) Like the other day, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2007 5:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Some new Vista LIPs have been released!

(I am still on vacation, but some news just shouldn't have to wait!) I promised that the हिन्दी (Hindi) LIP would the first of many.... and now they have made good on this promise. There are in fact two LIPs now available. One for Català (Catalan) and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 04, 2007 3:24 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

ᗷIᔓY ᗷΑСKᔓΟN

I am on vacation this week (in Beachwood, Ohio visiting family). Thought I'd mention it here just so no one thinks I am trapped under something heavy or was hit by a bus or anything.... I have been inspired by a topic or three so I may blog some later Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 03, 2007 1:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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There is no spoon^H^H^H^H^HGDI Font Cache

People often talk about the "GDI Font Cache" as if it were a real entity. And those same people may explain how a call to AddFontResource will dynamically update the font cache, session wide. Some of them may even how explain how the font list under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 01, 2007 1:24 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

I Kana understand you, could you repeater that? (Part 2)

Moving past the issues I discussed in I Kana understand you, could you repeater that? (Part 1) , there are some additional ones of interest. There are several characters here that can be added to the discussion beyond U+3005 and U+303b : U+3031 (〱) -- Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 01, 2007 2:55 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
 
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