Upgrading the rank of the people we talk about calendars with

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/07/06 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/07/06/3720057.aspx


People who have been reading here for a while know that I am pretty down on the way Windows supports calendars. Posts like Calendars on Win32 -- Not all there yet and Calendars on Win32 -- just there for show.... make it clear that the limitations in the way calendars are implemented simply bother me any time I think about them.

And as posts like Calendars.NET -- new platform, new issues show, I don't think the situation really improved all that much under .NET.

The underlying architecture of calendars on both platforms is just really not inspiring.

However, calendars themselves fascinate me.

In fact, were it not for the fact that there are a few other things that capture more of my fascination (e.g. collation and linguistics), I'd actually be trying to push vision documents and architecture proposals for how I see calendars working in the future. It is a very interesting area that deserves the time and attention, generally.

Maybe one day I'll talk about some of my thoughts in this space, too. Just to mix it up a bit!

In any case, when Shelby Eaton (our SDET who owns calendars) set up a two hour meeting for people in my old group to talk with Nachum Dershowitz (co-author of Calendrical Calculations), I knew I had to be there.

(And yes, I had him sign my copy of his book!)

That book, in both of its editions, not only was of tremendous help in learning about calendars, but they have actually helped lots of other people as my copies kept getting borrowed by people over the course of the last few years....

Anyway, the whole conversation was really fascinating, and I suspect it may even be ongoing as people work to determine what happens next with calendars, and how to make for a better international experience in the future for calendars in both managed and unmanaged code.

 

This post brought to you by 𐂵 (U+100b5, a.k.a. LINEAR B IDEOGRAM B173 MONTH)


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referenced by

2007/07/21 Theory vs. practice in software development

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