What is a Character? (this Thursday)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/06/02 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/06/02/10018725.aspx


Back in the middle of April I did a training. A class. A presentation.

On the day it was going to happen, I wrote a blog about it, entitled REAL engineers use the command line!.

So that any internal Microsoft people who wanted to see it could see it.

I received mail from a bunch of people who were angry that I had not given enough notice, putting up a blog just a few hours beforehand.

So this time I thought I'd put up the information a little earlier!

So here goes....

On Thursday, June 3, 2010, in 86/2833, I will be presenting my talk entitled What is a Character? with the following description:

Unicode mostly makes it easier, but combining characters, surrogate pairs, variation selectors, and Unicode control characters make the user’s impression of “what is a character” often not match the developer definition. This talk is a primer to set the record straight about all of it and most importantly how to not invalidate user data while manipulating it given these different entities that will exist in the data.

Note that the target audience is mainly developers -- and the testers who want to pick up the scenarios for several dozen bugs to enter!

So, if you are internal to Microsoft and would like to pop by, it is going to be a barn burner. :-)


Cory Nelson on 2 Jun 2010 6:25 PM:

I recently had the fun of introducing a few developers to the concepts of code points VS code units VS grapheme clusters.  I'm sure you will do a better job of it!

zooba on 2 Jun 2010 11:42 PM:

Don't you have an internal mailing list for this sort of thing (you know, the one that annoying people use to send rubbish to absolutely everyone :) )?

Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Jun 2010 12:17 AM:

I do. But I choose to also post it here, as is my right (being the author). :-)

zooba on 5 Jun 2010 4:10 PM:

Absolutely your right, and we like knowing that you do these gigs (it adds credibility ;) ). I just thought it odd that you'd advertise an internal presentation in a public forum when you've got wider-reaching internal options (which you've also used, so I guess everything's good.)

How did it go, by the way? Or is there a full blog post coming up?


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referenced by

2010/06/14 World-Ready Input, a presentation today (Monday)

2010/06/03 Unicode 6.0.0 in beta!

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