by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/08/03 14:01 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/08/03/10192416.aspx
After The only way to be impressed by Microsoft is to ignore calendars and The "Thai Buddhist" calendar isn't, not to mention the myriad of blogs they point to, it becomes obvious that I'm not a fan of calendar support on Windows.
It's incomplete.
It's buggy.
It's architecturally unsound.
Yet one of the most common questions I get about calendars is:
Why are you limited in what calendars you can select by the current user locale?
Even over in Office people ask me about this one.
After all, they support the notion of letting you pick whatever calendar you want, even if doesn't make sense.
"Why can't we?" they ask.
For me, the answer is in the question.
And it has a lot to do with what I think are some philosophical differences between Windows and Office when it comes to International support.
I mean, they need to solve a problem, a hard problem. Like (for example) holiday support. Or address formats.
They build something buggy and incomplete, rife with issues. And they ask us to take it on -- "with their data as a starting point, since that should make it easier!"
Only it doesn't -- because there are complicated issues underneath that make it harder to get things to work right.
Issues that they ignore....
And really that's not our style -- we'd rather do it right!
I mean, what's the point in doing it wrong, anyway?
We don't do that sort of thing!
Well, except for calendars, that is....