Last time I mentioned that we all have biases ingrained into our subconscious by our cultures, but I didn’t address how we avoid being tripped up by those problems in the first place. Unfortunately, it is difficult to be specific. I can say “did you know that some places tend toward a month/day date format…
We’re all Naïve
When we’re designing an application, it’s good to consider the global needs of our users. There are often egregious cases where an app depends on something very specific, like a US code page, that isn’t very portable to other cultures. However, the more insidious cases are where the developers think that they’ve considered the global…
I used to be doing more than a post a year, maybe that’ll change?
Apparently I’ve been distracted by other things! I’ll try to post some more, hopefully not too un-wise things.
Windows 10 make the best guess for all languages/locales
I’ve mentioned before to be careful about NLS Locale & Culture Data Churn, in that Locale Data Should Not Be Considered Stable, but there’s an interesting aspect of that in Windows 10. Windows 10 Supports all Locales – Kinda. We kept getting asked for more and more locale/language data and applications kept running into trouble…
Dates and flagging some sort of condition
Occasionally I get strange questions about things like “why does the calendar end in 9999?” or “how come my maxdate Dec 31, 9999 blows up for this Arabic user?” Well, each calendar has a “supported date range”, which is sometimes kind of arbitrary, but other times is related to limitations of know information. Some have…
Locale Data in Windows 10 & CLDR
I’ve blogged about Locale Data Churn a couple times in the past, and mentioned how to use the Locale Builder to modify Finnish for Windows 10, but I’d like to talk a bit more about Locale Data in Windows 10. A Data Collection Problem As I’ve mentioned before, Locale Data changes over time for various reasons. …
Locale (Culture) Data Churn
Data Churn Some of you have noticed churn in the Locale Data (which ends up as Culture data in .Net). I’ve mentioned before that this stuff shouldn’t be considered stable, but in Windows 10 we have a little more churn than normal. What happens is that, over time, locale data preferences change around the world. …
Locale Builder and Finnish or other locales…
The Locale Builder tool, https://aka.ms/localebuilder, runs on Windows 10 and can be used to modify your computer’s locale if you don’t want the defaults that ship in the OS. For example, the Finnish locale was updated to use . for the time separator, however that is currently causing some confusion because it is identical to…
Go Team XBox!
“Team XBox” is participating in a Lego Mindstorms “Build for Good” robotics competition at the EMP today. (I’m part of the team). Amazon, Expedia, HTC, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Xbox & Zulily will be competing for charity, so cheer Team XBox on. The winner gets to name a charity to receive some Lego Mindstorms sets. I think our entry will be…
EAI (Email Address Internationalization) address validation
I’ve been asked a few times how to verify how an international email address is well formed. International email addresses have unicode in the local part of the address (before the @), or in the domain name, or both. This problem is actually a bit trickier than many people expect because actual rules for email…