Globalization, I18N, L10N and Related Resources [Shawn Steele]

Hi, I’m Shawn. I mostly work on Windows Vista, but I also work on lots of the stuff in System.Text and System.Globalization. Most of my expertise is in Encodings, IDN & Unicode Normalization, and CultureInfo, particularly Custom Cultures.

I blog about both the .NET and native Windows APIs in these areas at https://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste. I also wrote “Windows Vista Globalization Features” for MSDN’s Magazine’s June 2006 CLR Inside Out. In that article I talk about how Windows Vista and the .NET Framework v2.0 work together, focusing on the Custom Culture/Locale feature, Encoding & Code Page behavior and other globalization related topics.

Some coworkers also blog about globalization, Michael Kaplan’s blog “Sorting It All Out” is very active. Michael talks about many different things including collation (sorting/CompareInfo), Encodings, Fonts, Keyboards and other issues.

Kieran Snyder also has her “Loneliness of the long-distance linguist” blog. Kieran works primarily on the Windows Vista “side” but has some comments about linguistics, culture & locale data and other interesting topics.

More generally there’s also the Microsoft Global Development and Computing Portal which talks about many topics globally aware developers need to know about.

Of course MSDN has documentation of the System.Globalization and System.Text namespaces, and Windows globalization technologies.

Also of interest might be the Microsoft Locale Builder tool and the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator tool.

- Shawn