by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/11/21 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/11/21/10370458.aspx
Earlier this month, someone reached out to me on Twitter.
Unfortunately for @KristoferA, I don't pay enough attention to my Twitter account!
Being in post-op rehab is no excuse.
This will be my 7,300th tweet, so maybe I should get better at this.
Sorry about that!
I think the ISO 639 code for Burmese is actually my.
Though I wouldn't recommend running over to .NET or Windows and trying my-MM, because the locale isn't supported.
We have lots of locales, to be sure.
But not that one.
Of course, we did add font, shaping, and keyboard support in Windows 8.
You can add it to the Language list, even, just by typing "Burmese" into the search box of the "Add language" dialog:
If you add it, you'll get a fun surprise.
Check out the dialog:
It knew to add the Myanmar keyboard layout.
Cool! :-)
So, no locale yet. But we started getting some support in.
The font is exquisite.
And the way everything came together to work here is kinda impressive.
There really was intent here to make a scenario work well, in a very integrated manner.
You would have to create a custom locale to come full circle and finish the job, but that too is an option.
Now I think that soon I'll give an example that doesn't show us in as flattering of a light.
Just so you don't start thinking we are too impressive. :-)
Stay tuned...
KristoferA on 21 Nov 2012 6:25 PM:
Hi Michael,
Thanks for replying. I didn't know you were in post-op rehab, hope your recovery is going well. Thanks for taking the time to research and blog about this despite that.
Let me give you a bit of background on why I asked: as you know, Burma/Myanmar is opening up for more business with the outside world, and a lot of countries and companies in the region (and worldwide) are paying more attention to Burma (including the first ever state visit to Burma by a US president when Obama and Clinton was there last week).
As a result of this, a client of mine is localizing their website for the Burmese market, so although I am not directly involved in that effort I was asked if I knew how to initialize a Burmese/Myanmar locale in .net. As you pointed out, that fails since .net don't yet have any support for that. However, as you also pointed out: a custom locale seems to do the trick, and the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class seems to be the key to handling it with a custom locale: msdn.microsoft.com/.../system.globalization.cultureandregioninfobuilder%28v=vs.100%29.aspx .
Next, as it goes for fonts, it is great that it has been added to Win8. However, a lot of users (esp in a web setting) can be expected to use other platforms (ranging from XP to Win7, or Mac/Linux/etc). It turns out that Google has some nice web fonts that can be used for that purpose: www.google.com/.../earlyaccess / code.google.com/.../tharlon-font , and of course it would be nice to see if Microsoft can maybe offer something similar by making the MSFT Burmese fonts available for download for Win7/XP/Vista as well...?
On a side-note: I came across something in a forum where someone complained that some glyphs in the Win8 burmese font were not 100% Unicode 5.x compatible. I will see if I can find that again, and will forward you the link.
Anyways, I hope that over the next few months we will see increased support for Burmese/Myanmar locale in different Microsoft products, including earlier Win versions and of course the .net framework. I am sure there are lots of companies eyeing the Burmese market right now, and having support for the language etc in Windows/IIS/ASP.net etc will definitely help...
Thanks again for the follow-up.
Best regards,
Kristofer