by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/12/14 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/12/14/1281344.aspx
Now up is the January issue of MSDN Magazine, a special Vista issue that includes an article by Julie D. Allen (Senior Editor and Project Manager with the Unicode Consortium), Cathy Wissink (Group Program Manager for Microsoft), and yours truly. :-)
The article is entitled Worldly Windows: Extend The Global Reach Of Your Applications With Unicode 5.0 and beyond talking about some of the reasons that Unicode is important and what is new in version 5.0, we really work to explain the real shift that has happened within the Microsoft Windows approach to Unicode and the impact that shift has had on Vista's support of Unicode. It also talks about many of the reasons behind that shift, in terms of not only the benefits to both Microsoft and Unicode but also the benefits to the people using Vista (and using Unicode, of course).
Also available in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese (with more languages such as Japanese coming soon!)
If you have ever been interested in those glimpses of strategy and how a company like Microsoft used to, now does, and later plans to approach a standard like Unicode, then you may really enjoy this article.
It was a tremendously fun article to write (for me at least; I would not try to speak for either Julie or Cathy here!) -- almost worthy of its own article, I think! I'll explain:
The initial outline was done by all three of us, and then the first drafts had Cathy and I passing the article back and forth as we added the parts we knew the most about (with lots of placeholders for stuff we knew one of the other authors would know more!). And then Cathy was on a vacation (planned before the article even came up as an idea) and the drafts were going back and forth between Julie and I as the rest of the content made its way in and the final polishing happened. We held off turning it in (giving Stephen a minor heart attack!) so that Cathy would have a chance to take a final look before we turned it in, but she liked it pretty much as is. And the result is now there for all to see.
I am amazed and impressed by both of their editing styles and their viewpoints, and if an opportunity to write something with them comes up again, consider me signed up. :-)
Previous MSDN Magazine articles I have been involved with mentioned here and here and here and here.
Enjoy!
This post brought to you by ᬅ (U+1b05, a.k.a. BALINESE LETTER AKARA)
# Carl on 14 Dec 2006 4:33 AM:
Attack of irony alert:
In the choose your language box on the page, Korean is garbled. Also, the choices for Chinese are 漢語 and 簡体中文, but I don't think those are proper pair. The first means "Han language" and the second "Simplified Chinese writing." To be consistent, it should be "traditional" versus simplified.
# Mike Dimmick on 14 Dec 2006 4:59 AM:
The title is actually 'Worldly Windows' but I prefer your version ;-)
# Michael S. Kaplan on 14 Dec 2006 7:42 AM:
Hmmm... typo!
# roxfan on 14 Dec 2006 4:59 PM:
The SEI link in the arcticle got a trailing parenthesis, making it a 404.
# Timur Safin on 14 Dec 2006 5:54 PM:
There is a Russian translation available almost instantly. it owuld be in January 2007 issue of a local MSDN Magazine - http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/01/Unicode/default.aspx?loc=ru
# Dean Harding on 14 Dec 2006 6:36 PM:
Also the "Click to enlarge image" link doesn't work for the second image - clicking it actually enlarges the first image! (I like the way that "click to enlarge" thing is done, BTW)
There doesn't seem to be any article feedback link on the page...
Nice article, though :-)
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