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May 2007 - Posts

Something .NET does less intuitively than they ought

If you are someone who reads the BCL Team blog, you may have seen Josh Free's String.Compare() != String.Equals() that he just posted. Of course this is old hat if you are a regular reader here and remember seeing Invariant vs. Ordinal, the third or Something Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Cutting the cord while someone else is shoring it up

Vista ships with a bunch of IMEs, as previous versions of Windows did. And even though they use the Text Services Framework (TSF) rather than the venerable Input Method Manager (IMM), there was no big set of "fake KLID" values added to the registry to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:42 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Nothing stinks worse than the thread locale, other than the thread code page

The piece of mail I got (via the Contact link) from Ken was: Hi Michael, I have run into what I believe is a bug in MultibyteToWideChar() and WideCharToMultibyte() when the code page parameter is set to CP_THREAD_ACP, 'default language for non-Unicode Read More...
Posted Monday, May 28, 2007 11:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Usage (customer intent) vs. Design (developer intent)

The Monday morning note I got via the Contact link was: Something that was pointed out to me: Windows standard (UK/US at least) keyboard layouts translate particular control+symbol sequences into particular characters, for example Ctrl+[ becomes ESC (27). Read More...
Posted Monday, May 28, 2007 4:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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On installing fonts

Mihai Suba asked over in the Suggestion Box: Is there a way to make Windows aware of a font copied in WINDOWS/FONTS by a program, without a restart or click-open that folder? For reference, I'll pull out the following two blog posts in a series entitled Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 26, 2007 10:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The PUA outside of Unicode

Colleague Aldo Donetti asked me: Hi Michael, I was investigating a bug and it turns out that this character ‘’(U+E843) is in the Private use range but it is also part of the Chinese 936 codepage. The issue is whether to consider characters in the private Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 26, 2007 8:55 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

I'd stop as soon as possible, IIf you'd let me

I read Paul Vick's post IIF becomes If, and a true ternary operator and saw that a version of Visual Basic was finally going to have an IIF() that was going to properly short-circuit and not run both conditions. And I thought about how they cheated on Read More...
Posted Friday, May 25, 2007 9:28 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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More significant than petty cache

Georg asked: One of my customers is enumerating fonts using the following code construct: foreach (FontFamily font in FontFamily.Families) { if (font.IsStyleAvailable(FontStyle.Regular)) cbxFontName.Items.Add(font); } They are wondering regarding the Read More...
Posted Friday, May 25, 2007 7:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

'Underage Thinking' is playing in the background

Absolutely nothing technical here! When I tell people I enjoy listening to Teddy Geiger 's Underage Thinking, people tend to look at me a little funny. And not just the people who have no idea who the hell Teddy Geiger is. Even the ones who know are a Read More...
Posted Friday, May 25, 2007 5:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Honey, you are the [_tWin]Main source of joy in my life!

Human gjcoram asks: I'm developing a unicode e-mail client (nPOPuk) -- works in Win32, Win32Unicode, and various WinCE platforms. I was tracking down a memory leak that originated from the fact that "lpCmdLine" is a char* rather than a TCHAR* in the declaration Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 24, 2007 5:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

How to do more sorting and grouping by 9am than most ListViews do all day

Remember when I talked about Grouping and Sorting in a ListView , how I couldn't find a way to do it? Well, Bevan pointed out: Greetings from New Zealand. I found your post on ListView sorting at this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/03/06/544257.aspx Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 24, 2007 4:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Could it BE any clearer that it isn't the Limonata?

(Nothing technical here, I promise!) Sometimes, the truth of a situation is subtle. It takes a whole lot of evidence to figure it out. And other times, it is so obvious that you wonder why you didn't notice it in the first place.... Start with the fact Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007 9:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Is it a cliché to say something like 'We're hiring!' ? :-)

You can see the image over on the right side of the blog -- just under my brain and just over the archives. It has a link to the current open posting across the entire organization (full size about 400 or so people). The positioning is an accident of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:17 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Getting the language of an LCID-less keyboard

Tom, a reasonably senior developer, asks (product names removed for no particular reason): Can users of publicly available keyboard layout creator make a layout that is not tied to a specific LCID? In other words, could the keyboard layout language be Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 2:09 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

MS Word says PUA is EA/CJK? TISNF!

Parag asks: Hi, I am a font developer from India. I have designed a multi-byte using private area of Unicode Range, and also a keyboard handler through which I want to use this multi-byte font in various applications. My problem is, when I run my keyboard Read More...
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Could you really call it a symbolic gesture from MS Typography?

The other day Alex asked me: Are there any plans for including support for U+267F (the international wheelchair symbol) in any of the fonts that ship with Windows? I'm interested in its inclusion, and I thought you might know something about it. -Alex Read More...
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007 8:38 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Have you taken a look in the mirror[ed ImageList] ?

Sometimes the questions and answers go by and I am just a spectator watching (either because I didn't know the answer so I was waiting myself to see what others came up with, or else because I wasn't looking at mail just then). The question Patrick asked Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 20, 2007 7:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Never without my permission, Redux

Some of you fans of The Fifth Element may recall my post You want to change the time zone? Eto Akta Gamat! from last September. It occurred to me after Bruce asked over in the Suggeston Box a question: The old "control.exe timedate.cpl,,/Z Pacific Time Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 20, 2007 9:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Ssang. Ssang. Come Back!

I must admit it sometimes takes me a while to think of a good title for a blog post. In fact, I have more than a few posts that are all ready to go other than missing a title, and I am waiting until I think of the title, in fact. It is for this reason Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 19, 2007 11:22 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Custom code pages? Redux

Warning: what is being described in this post is documented but is not supported. Please keep this mind before considering it! People ask me all the time how to create custom code pages. Like regular reader Ivan Petrov, who has asked several times (e.g. Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 19, 2007 9:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Farther in the future could I accept it being sung as Further Down?

So a friend of mine was talking with me the other day. She mentioned that she has been reading my blog. This stopped me for a minute as I had to adjust the universe a bit -- the people who read here know a whole lot about me that previously you would Read More...
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 8:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Not spacing out on spacing forms of characters

Chris asks: I have a question about ToUnicodeEx and its behavior when detecting dead-keys. It wants to put the spacing-version of the accent into the string buffer, but I am looking for a way to get the non-spacing equivalent. Is there system call somewhere Read More...
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 6:43 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

A private CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder does not imply a private CultureInfo

Brian asks via the Contact link: I have a quick question about your post and I must be missing something. I would like to create a custom CultureInfo in memory and maybe save it to disk and I think your solution could do that, but how to load it into Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 17, 2007 8:13 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

If a bunch of specific Unicode characters can no longer live in the same apartment together, can they really claim that they needed their space?

So dipaksmistry asks (in an off-topic manner in response to this post): Hi, I have written a small programme. Its code is as below. ######################### #include "stdafx.h" #include <tchar.h> #include <Shellapi.h> #include <malloc.h> Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 17, 2007 2:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Stripping is an interesting job (aka On the meaning of meaningless, aka All Mn characters are non-spacing, but some are more non-spacing than others)

(apologies to George Orwell, of course!) Val asks: Michael, I've been reading your "Striping Diacritics" post, and it's been a great help. I've also been comparing it with another version I've seen. This other version is similar to yours, except that Read More...
Posted Monday, May 14, 2007 10:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Keyboards that map any language to any other language, or the lack thereof

A couple of days ago, in response to Language support for non-native speakers , Bertilo Wennergren commented : So what about people used to a Cyrillic keyboard wanting to type Chinese or Hindi or Arabic? Or people used to an Arabic keyboard wanting to Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 13, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

There is no more Limonata at Trader Joe's

(This is a post about Limonata) Yesterday afternoon, I scooted over to Trader Joe's to get a few cases of San Pellegrino Limonata. I'm down to just a few and I like to stay stocked up, after all. The shelf had nothing. And no space for it either. I look Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 13, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Kowloon 951

(As a point of information, both the fourth and ninth most important realizations of my entire life happened many years ago in two different places not far from Kowloon Bay ; therefore, I want to make it clear that this somewhat lame attempt at a clever Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 12, 2007 1:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The exception that proves the rule that was the exception that proves another rule (aka On the variability of the Invariant)

It was over two years ago that Shawn talked about how Culture data shouldn't be considered stable (except for Invariant) . In that post he was explaining how cultural and regional data was all subject to change at pretty much any time, with the one exception Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 12, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Cyrillic looks so spacy when viewed from some parts of East Asia....

So I was looking at a bug on the cool Vista machine (you know, this one !) the other day.... Since I last talked about it (a few months ago, to be more precise), I installed a whole bunch of UI languages on it. Like more than the list of those currently Read More...
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

The CRT and UTF-8

Sebastian asks: Our runtime system is written in C and relies on standard C routines like mblen()/mbtowc() to handle multi-byte characters according to setlocale() settings... I understand the 65001 codepage is not well supported in VC++ 7.1 and it has Read More...
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007 7:49 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

¿səlqɐsnɟuoɔ sɐ ʇunoɔ əsəɥʇ op

Charles is always good for a fun link or two, an the mail he sent a while back is no exception: Hi Michael; Don't know if the above subject line comes through okay; just wondering if characters whose glyphs are mirrored or inverted transformations of Read More...
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

English on Spanish?

Carlos asks: Hello Michael. I received a new notebook with Vista Business Edition in Spanish (my local language) but I need it also in English, I search for a LIP file for english and can't find it. Does English LIP installation exists? it is possible Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 10, 2007 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 19 Comments

Language support for non-native speakers

A while back, someone asked a question that was forwarded to me by a colleague: Re:the MS Arabic keyboard,the keystrokes are set up according to some arbitrary layout.This may be useful for people whose 1st lang.is Arabic and are using some standard Arabic Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 09, 2007 7:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Sometimes you need more than StringInfo

Sometimes people expect StringInfo to do more than it is designed to do. Like just the other day when Federica asked: Hi We are trying to parse a set of strings and read each joined char as 1 text element Using the System.Globalization.StringInfo::ParseCombiningCharacters Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 09, 2007 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Update⁴ for Romanian and Bulgarian

A small follow-up on European Union Expansion Font Update that I talked about previously in Even the characters with no weight can be given weight in their own special way and Update on the update to the update for Romanian and Bulgarian .... Well, for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 5:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Back to back to back[formation] (aka, Step on a crack, break your mama's back[-formation])

It was like literally a year and a day when I posted See you soon? and it was a year when Eric Lippert (in a comment ) asked: and why is it that on Classic Rock radio stations they always say "playing classic hits, back to back!" ? Surely the BACK of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Can't say sh*t, now can I? (aka On not biting the hand, yada yada yada)

There is a powerful spam filter on http://blogs.msdn.com/ now. A very powerful one in fact. There really are a ton of spam messages that it catches. So I don't want to seem ungrateful here. But recently when I posted Does bear shit in woods^H^H^H^H^HSlovenia? Read More...
Posted Monday, May 07, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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The Unicode train? It left the station....

Heiko Braeske asks in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup: I have a Non-Unicode-Application and I want to show text in the common controls (e.g. CEdit) with a specific character set. I thought I could manage this by setting the Read More...
Posted Monday, May 07, 2007 8:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

One product's feature is another product's bug -- just ask 'em!

Different products have different ways of describing what is essentially the same behavior. Part of the reason for this is that the audiences are often very different, and it is therefore a matter common sense that something might be described differently. Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 06, 2007 10:18 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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All right, mistakes were made #2 (What the %#$* is wrong with German Phonebook sorting?)

(Apologies once again for the Dogma/Carlin allusion in the title) I'll start by posting the moral of the story first: Always comment your code so that others know what you were thinking! Continuing on from the prior post -- All right, mistakes were made Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 05, 2007 12:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

All right, mistakes were made #1 (a.k.a. Expanding the EXPANSION table)

(Apologies for the Dogma/Carlin allusion in the title) It was funny how it all happened. Not funny Ha-Ha, more like funny interesting. It is about a bug. Maybe I should explain. I have mentioned EXPANSIONS in the past, and how you can access them directly, Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 05, 2007 9:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The limitations of keyboard layouts (again)

Balkrishna asked the following via the contact link: hi michael, saw your blog for the first time today and learnt a lot. i have just installed MSKLC 1.4 today and tried generating a keyboard layout for a tamil font - non-unicode, typewriter layout. i Read More...
Posted Friday, May 04, 2007 2:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Changing the keyboard for always?

(The inspiration for the title is from a Buck Rogers episode from the second season that I doubt anyone will recall!) Craig's question was: How do you change the Keyboard input local correctly? We need to change it in all process, but looks like LoadKeyboardLayout Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 9:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Does bear shit in woods^H^H^H^H^HSlovenia?

Kind of a fun localization issue one of the OEMs noticed. They were looking at the Slovenian LIP, with two identically named menu items on that menu Moishe Lettvin talked about that I mentioned before . Luckily the ToolTips are different for people who Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 7:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Every character has a story #26: CAPITAL SHARP S (might be encoded?)

(ref: Every character has a story #15: CAPITAL SHARP S (not encoded) ) When Michel Suignard came back from the WG2 meeting, I scooted over to get the quick word on what interesting things happened.... I was surprised to hear that the Capital Sharp S was Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Note to self: don't run over the General Manager

People in the building may not believe me, but I am very careful to make sure I do n't ever hit people with the scooter while I am going through the building. Sure, I make jokes about how it is a "strict rule" to never hit developers versus an "important Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 11:29 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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There is no IsDBCSTrailByte

bcbryant asks: DBCS trailing bytes always seem to be greater than or equal to 0x40 although the GB18030 mentions some use of 0x30+ in four byte characters. Do you know of any official source for a restriction that would allow me to depend on the trailing Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Not everyone does the right thing for Romanian

Regular reader Cristian Secară asks: Hi Michael, Maybe you have a clue on a specific characters ș & ț issue ... Romanian Windows Vista users noticed that when trying to type messages in Yahoo Messenger using (also) characters ș and/or ț (you know, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 7:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

HALFWIDTH != Half the width

So what do you think is wrong with the following code? WCHAR wz1[] = L"\uFF71"; // HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER A WCHAR wz2[] = L"\u30A2"; // KATAKANA LETTER A // Make sure the half width characters have half the width if(CompareStringW(LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 6:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
 
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