Globalization Improvements in Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0

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Globalization Improvements in Microsoft .NET
Framework v2.0

• Achim Ruopp
• International Program Manager
• Microsoft Corporation

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Agenda

• Custom Cultures
• Replacement Cultures
• Supplemental Cultures
• Defining and Using Custom Cultures
• Improved Unicode Standard Support
• International Domain Names
• Normalization
• Supplementary and Combining Characters
• Unicode Character Data Information
• New Calendars
• Miscellaneous Improvements

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Visual Studio and .NET Framework Versions
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Custom Cultures

• Culture locale in .NET Framework
• Users require the ability to create new cultures
• Replacement Cultures
• Customizing existing cultures
• using the same culture name
• Supplemental Cultures
• Customizing existing cultures
• using a new culture name e.g. ja-JP-MyCompany or
  en-US-24hour
• New combination of language and location
• es-US for Spanish in the US
• Support for minority languages
• Sorbian in Germany wen-DE, hsn-DE, dsn-DE

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Custom Cultures in v1.0/v1.1

• New combination of language and location
• Set CurrentCulture and CurrentUIculture to
  different values
• Example es-US (Spanish-United States)
• set CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture to es (for
  resources)
• set CurrentThread.CurrentCulture to en-US (for
  formatting)
• Disadvantages
• Date text is English, unless DateTimeFormatInfo
  is overridden
• Override CultureInfo to create custom culture
• Existing custom culture sample on GotDotNet
  http//www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Det
  ails.aspx?SampleGuida193b952-2e44-45ed-811d-c1fab
  f2f6e8a
• Disadvantages
• Developers have to create their own
  implementations
• Custom Culture not equal to built-in cultures
• Application domain limitation custom culture
  must be recreated across app domains
• Some APIs create CultureInfo objects internally
  which cannot be overriden

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Custom Cultures in v2.0

• Goals
• Fix the disadvantages from v1.0/v1.1
• Make custom cultures equal to built in cultures
• Makes usage easy
• Allow to easily deploy custom cultures
• Allow Custom Cultures to be serialized into LDML
  (Locale Data Markup Language) for portability
• LDML is described in Unicode Technical Standard
  35
• http//www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/

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Custom Cultures in v2.0

• System.Globalization.CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder
• New class to create and manage custom cultures
• Need to add reference to sysglobl.dll to use
• Have to be administrator to register a custom
  culture
• Custom cultures are equivalents to built-in
  cultures
• Listed by CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.All
  Cultures)
• Cannot define new sort orders, calendars or
  character encodings
• Can reuse all the existing ones
• Cannot define a new LocaleID (LCID) for
  interfacing with native Win32 code
• UI designer only available as a sample

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Custom Cultures in v2.0Replacement Cultures

• Culture will have the same LCID as the culture it
  replaces
• Culture cannot change collation info
• Culture must include the default calendar from
  the replaced culture in the available calendars
  list
• Does not have to be default
• Use culture-invariant formatting for
  communicating data to other machines!

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Personalize A Culture24 Hour Format

• CultureInfo ciUS new CultureInfo("en-US",
  false)
• RegionInfo riUS new RegionInfo("US")
• CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib new
  CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("en-US",
  CultureAndRegionModifiers.Replacement)
• carib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo( ciUS )
• carib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo( riUS )
• carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.ShortTimePattern
  "HHmmss"
• // Register to deploy on this machine need to
  be admin
• carib.Register()
• // Optional save to an LDML file to deploy to
  other machines
• carib.Save("e\\tmp\\myculture.ldml")
• // Instantiate a new CultureInfo object
• CultureInfo ci new CultureInfo("en-US")

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Create A New CultureSpanish in the U.S.

• CultureInfo ciES new CultureInfo("es-ES")
• CultureInfo ciUS new CultureInfo("en-US")
• RegionInfo riUS new RegionInfo("US")
• CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib new
  CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("es-US",
• CultureAndRegionModifiers.None)
• carib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo( ciES )
• carib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo( riUS )
• // Set the currency symbol and DateTimeFormat
  information
• carib.NumberFormat.CurrencySymbol
  ciUS.NumberFormat.CurrencySymbol
• carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat
  ciUS.DateTimeFormat
• carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.DayNames
  ciES.DateTimeFormat.DayNames
• ...
• // Register the data for deployment on this
  machine
• carib.Register()
• // Instantiate a new CultureInfo from our new
  data
• CultureInfo ci new CultureInfo("es-US")

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Developing and Deploying a Custom Culture
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Multilingual Web AddressesInternational Domain
Names

• New Standard (IDN, RFCs 3454, 3490, 3491, 3492)
• http//www.ietf.org/html.charters/idn-charter.html
  
• Enables non-ASCII domain names 
• www.loréal.com
• www.???.com
• IDN Mapping class containing IDN conversion APIs
• System.Globalization.IdnMapping
• GetAscii and GetUnicode provide host name
  conversion between Unicode and Punycode
• Browser plug-ins available for Internet Explorer
• Clarification
• This support does not cover Internationalized
  Resource Identifiers (IRIs, RFC 3987)
• Microsoft Web Platform is already using UTF-8,
  but needs more work to be compliant

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International Domain Names
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Normalization

• Support for all 4 normalization forms (C,D,KC,KD)
  
• õhµ (U00f5 U0068 U0302 U00b5 U00a8)LATIN
  SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE LATIN SMALL LETTER H
  COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT MICRO SIGN
  DIAERESIS
• FormC õhµ (U00f5 U0125 U00b5 U00a8)
• FormD ohµ (U006f U0303 U0068 U0302
  U00b5 U00a8)
• FormKC õhµ  (U00f5 U0125 U03bc U0020
  U0308)
• FormKD ohµ  (U006f U0303 U0068 U0302
  U03bc U0020 U0308)
• Normalize strings
• public string Normalize(System.Text.NormalizationF
  orm normalizationForm)
• Verify normalization or normalization form
• public bool IsNormalized(System.Text.Normalization
  Form normalizationForm)
• Implementation conforms to sample in Unicode
  Standard Annex 15
• http//www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/

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Supplementary and Combining Characters

• v. 1.0, 1.1
• Methods in StringInfo class to parse characters
  and walk text elements
• v. 2.0
• Additional methods on StringInfo to find
  surrogate pairs/combining characters in
  substrings
• public string SubstringByTextElements (int
  startingTextElement, int lengthInTextElements)
• New property to determine length of strings
  containing surrogate pairs/combining characters
• public int LengthInTextElements get
• Char.IsLetter recognizes surrogate pairs in
  strings
• New methods in System.Char class to detect high
  and low surrogate codepoints, surrogate pairs

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Updates to encodings

• Now built into the Base Class Library (BCL)
• Improved performance
• More flexibility
• Consistent results across supported platforms
• Encoding enumeration API
• UTF-32 support (little endian and big endian)
• Use UTF-16 or UTF-8 for better performance and
  memory efficiency
• UTF-16 big endian support
• Encoding/decoding fallbacks
• Allows reacting to errors in encoding to and from
  Unicode in different ways
• Exception
• Replacement
• Best fit
• Custom

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Unicode Character Data Information

• New System.Globalization.CharUnicodeInfo class
• GetUnicodeCategory
• categories could be used in regular expressions
  in v1.0/v1.1 but not easily retrieved
• Numeric character information
• GetDecimalDigitValue
• GetDigitValue
• e.g. U2160 Roman Numeral One ? 1
• GetNumericValue
• e.g. U00BC Vulgar Fraction One Quarter ¼ 0.25

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New Calendars

• Full calendars
• Can be set as default calendar for CultureInfo
• Enable parsing and formatting of dates
• New UmAlQura calendar
• Implementation of Hijiri calendar
• Conversion calendars
• Enable date conversions between regional
  calendars
• Jalaali calendar
• Calender used in Farsi communities
• East Asian Lunisolar calendars
• PRC
• Taiwan
• Japan
• Korea

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Miscellaneous Improvements

• Windows data derived cultures
• Windows XP SP2 added 25 new locales
• .NET Framework v2.0 can emulate cultures for
  these
• Information about text direction
• LineOrientation/IsRightToLeft properties in
  TextInfo
• RFC 3066(bis)-compliant language tags
• IetfLanguageTag property of CultureInfo
• GetCultureByIetfLanguageTag function in
  CultureInfo

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Miscellaneous Improvements

• Shortest day names
• ShortestDayNames in DateTimeFormatInfo
• Enables display of compact date strings/calendars
• Information about command line support
• GetConsoleFallbackUICulture

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References

• Visual Studio 2005/.NET Framework v2.0
• http//lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/
• LDML specification
• http//www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/
• Internet Explorer plugins for IDN support
• http//support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scidkb
  en-us842848
• Microsoft Globaldev website
• http//www.microsoft.com/globaldev/
• Newsgroup
• newsmicrosoft.public.dotnet.internationalization
  
• W3C IDN/IRI article
• http//www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-i
  ri/

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References - continued

• Blogs
• http//blogs.msdn.com/michkap
• http//blogs.msdn.com/AchimR
• http//www.dasblonde.net/
• http//blogs.msdn.com/BCLTeam

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