You're doing it wrong.

(Title inspired by that Michael Keaton/Teri Garr movie, the one with all the role reversal!)

Regular reader KJK:Hyperion mentioned in the Suggestion Box:

Hey Michael, can you please spank the Application Verifier people for me? thanks.

Their logging is broken.

Not only they use locale id instead of user UI language for display strings, but they can't even really handle it correctly: they produce an XML log that proudly declares itself UTF-8, but actually contains strings in the current ANSI codepage.

This breaks Standard User Analyzer (an Application Verifier front end) horribly because apparently (shock! horror!) the .NET XML parser actually uses the encoding specified in the file header.

Well, I am not sure I have the temperament to be Microsoft's CSO (Corporate Spanking Officer), or even the Technical Lead reporting in to the CSO (in charge of international issues, of course!).

But I think I'll talk about the problem a bit here, and maybe that can be enough of a virtual spanking.... :-)

There are obviously many sins here:

• Using the locale instead of the UI language -- which really is the right setting to be using here for log files (well, either that or ID values that Standard User Analyzer uses to look up strings in the appropriate UI language!)
• Using the system default code page (isn't Application Verifier a Unicode application?)
• Mislabeling the encoding of the log file

Now everyone knows that XML is sexy and if you are writing any kind of file then it has to be some sort of markup language. But the support for using it right is built into both the unmanaged MSXML and the managed System.Xml. So there really never is a good excuse to do it wrong.

So, cheers to tools like the Standard User Analyzer for its virtues.

And jeers to Application Verifier for its sins. Welcome to the Unicode Lame List!

This post brought to you by ꉕ (U+a255, YI SYLLABLE HXUOP)