Is Whidbey's international support finished?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/04/24 02:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/04/24/411329.aspx

Some of the international features look unfinished in Whidbey. For example:

There is a RegionInfo.GeoId and no actual GEO properties like the ones from the Win32 GEO APIs.

There are NumberFormatInfo.NativeDigits and NumberFormatInfo.DigitSubstitution properties and a DigitShapes enumeration, with no parsing or formatting support that uses these properties.

There are CharUnicodeInfo.GetDecimalDigitValue,  CharUnicodeInfo.GetNumericValue, and CharUnicodeInfo.GetDigitValue methods, but there is nothing in the parsing support for numbers to handle this information.

So whattup with all that?

It is not as bad as it seems, really.

The main cause of the first two issues above is that in order for custom cultures in Whidbey to one day form the basis of custom locales in Longhorn, there must be support for all of the Longhorn-required locale features. In this context, it is crucial to make sure that the supported Longhorn fields are covered (the supported Whidbey ones are already there, obviously). The cause of the third has more to do with the fact that corrdinating such changes takes time, and it has to be done early ina product cycle after people really sit down and figure out the feature.

Would these features be compelling ones to consider adding? Certainly! But it will take some time to plan them out and talk to the owners of other features to help them get the integration happening. You will want to look to a future release for the proper integration of those ideas into the core product.

You can consider them being in there now as

1. vaporware typical of an evil empire like Microsoft;
2. an early chance to make use of the data features yourself as data;
3. a chance for custom cultures you create to be fully functional in the future (Longhorn) enviornment if you want to use them
4. (2) and (3)
5. all of the above

(Hint -- choice "4" is the correct answer, but I am not really going to keep track of those who prefer to choose "5". :-)

This post brought to you by "Ξ" (U+039e, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER XI)

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