Globalization

Unlisted Bug Fix in .NET 1.1 SP1 - CultureInfo sr (Serbian)

Yow-Hann Lee — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:47:00 GMT

The site, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/867460, list all the known bug fixes for the .NET Framework 1.1 in Service Pack 1. The following change in behavior from previous builds of .NET 1.1 is not an item listed on the support page.

So in continuation with my previous blog entry highlighting interesting little quirks in Globalization efforts in .NET, I would like to point one out for Serbian.

The following:

CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("sr");

Console.WriteLine(ci.NativeName);

will return the expected output of "srpski" to you IF you have .NET 1.1 SP1 installed. (You can determine which build number of .NET 1.1 you have installed by checking the version of mscorlib.dll, Microsoft CLR Class Library, on your machine).

For example, if you had the original RTM (1.1.4322.573) or another earlier release (1.1.4322.985), the above code will throw an exception on you.

However, you will be fine if you have the latest .NET build (1.1.4322.2300).

Just to add to this, "sr" is recognized by CultureInfo but is not highlighted in the documentation. According to the .NET 1.1 SDK doc (ms-help://MS.NETFrameworkSDKv1.1/cpref/html/frlrfSystemGlobalizationCultureInfoClassTopic.htm), documented strings for Serbian are "sr-SP-Cyrl" and "sr-SP-Latn". Notice how the two letter representation "sr" is not mentioned. However, for other languages with different locales (i.e. French), it also includes the two letter representation, "fr" in its documentation.

Microsoft Support and MSDN do a great job of providing instructions and highlighting issues. But as the saying goes, "there are just so many things and so little time". Catching all the quirks here and there is not an easy task. So this is where the MSDN Community Content/Wiki kicks in.

In a future blog entry, I will highlight some of the discrepancies in dealing with identifying the user language directly from the http request and mapping it to a culture. In the meantime, Happy Globalization.

MSDN Community Content/Wiki (finally, my blog entry on this)

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 03:28:00 GMT

I had known about the MSDN Community Content (aka wiki style setup) for some time. I know, I know...its beta existed for several months (earlier in the year?). So my entry is a bit belated.

But now that I have finally contributed to the MSDN community with a couple entries, I feel that I can blog about it. The fact that it was brought up as a point of conversation recently amongst colleagues sparked me to finally contribute.

They had mentioned how after years of sifting through documentation, they were always left wanting just a bit more. In MSDN's defense, it is great at getting people started and on the right track with good documentation and simple examples. This is a goal that MSDN has met and achieved. However, as with anything, people always want "more" =). They want more sophisticated real world scenarios and detailed descriptions of quirks here and there.

And now with MSDN Community Content, exactly such an opportunity exists. To top it off, it is user generated content coming from people that have been in the trenches and consuming the APIs. It's a bit like taking a slice out of the Wikipedia success and the less well-known fact (according to a colleague) that only a handful of people contribute to specialized topics. While this results in content that is not reflective of the entire general population, it provides a good medium between content that is packaged and fed to you vs. user generated content.

MINOR GLITCHES (ISSUE IN FIREFOX)

My experience with MSDN Community Content edit mode has been decent. There were cross browser issues. For example, in IE, if you attempt to Add content more than once, a popup dialog will appear stating that "You cannot add more than one block at one time". However, if you do the exact same thing in Firefox 2.0, another text editor will appear below your existing one. The footer of the page then starts to act up and flicker.

In true wiki fashion, you can see the history of user generated content by clicking on the 'Show History' text links.

MY POSTS

You can find a couple of my posts here (.NET 1.1 bug with zh-MO CultureInfo.NativeName) and here (tip for use of HybridDictionary in ListDictionary page).

SUSBSCRIBE TO FEED

Lastly, in web 2.0 fashion, you can subscribe to a contributor's feeds.

My feed can be found at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/User-yowhann.aspx

While the search engines on technical content is fairly decent, this is just another drive or effort towards aggregating and consolidating human or in this case, technical knowledge. The internet is slowly coming to realize Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. Although, if you refer to IETF, there are a lot who are not there yet (see wikipedia content on WebDAV).

Bug/Known issue CultureInfo zh-MO (Macau) .NET 1.1 vs. .NET 2.0

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:50:00 GMT