Internationalization of applications

I was going over my backlog today (about 5k unread posts that I’m going to try and finish reading in the next few days), and noticed an interesting post from Raymond (well, one of many, but one I can blog about).

The subject of internationalization is highly more complex than just using resource files and letting applications use the ToString() method with a culture. Numbers can be different. In some languages, “I” is not the uppercase of “i”. Digits are not between 0-9. This subject is important to understand, and CultureInfo.InvariantCulture is your friend.

For that matter, one of my early .net projects was a batch parser. I was thinking, well, if (command.ToUpper() == “IN”), it failed miserably, my Turkish customers thought I didn’t care about them. They were nice enough to say that setting the English culture for the application resolved the issue, and I had a chance to correct the bug.

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asp.net and IIS follow-up

Following my article on asp.net hosting, Dave writes about this document that I could’ve used and have less investigation to do should have I found it. Great complementary content to my article. My favorite piece of Dave’s post? “The real eye opener in the article for me was…”. Now I’m happy as I know at least one person found something useful for their job. Benjamin told me, quite insightfully, that I needed to market my content better. And I think I have a beginning of it!

From julien, I’m also going to review it as soon as I get out of illness and conferencing about the code access security, the partial trust execution under .net 1.1 and how it is built. Thanks for reviewing and giving me your comments Julien! And yes, as soon as I come back from Amsterdam, I’ll finish my review on your Petshop SOA article. Sorry for the delay.

Time to bed. No, time to bed is way way past what I can afford. So off to grab a few hours of sleep. Will blog from the conference if it gets too boring! (That, and if I can get any wireless connection in my new hotel!)

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Why I'm going silent for a while

I just want to let the people I like and also the people I talk to that I may not be very vocal on messenger, phone, or whatever. The technical side of things will keep on coming, but I’m going through a very painful moment of my personal life, with a highly probable very painful moment in my professional life in the next few weeks / months. This does not let me do as much as I’d like, and if we ever met and discussed, you would know that my involvement in many projects and many domains have been below what would be needed for me to achieve, because I thought that doing so would be enough to keep me at bay on the personal side. Obviously this is no longer true. I need to find what is true and what is not, and for that I need temporarily to concentrate on that, and on my on line life that actually leads me somewhere professionally.

Thanks to the friends that are there for me, thanks also to the friends that are not there and were never really there in the first place. I said when I opened this web site that I was back. Actually, I think I was just born again, and I need to go through teenage again. Convince myself that I’m better than what I’m told. Convince myself I am good. Convince myself I’m worth something. Yes, that’s it. That I’m worth it.

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