Internationalization With Visual Basic [Paperback]

Good for me that the supposition didn't confirm to be real, and the beginning of the book with the glossary helped a lot on that, because there was in my head a lot of confusion on some of the terms, and that caused some problems reading some articles on this same subject, but with all the explanation up front I felt more comfortable progressing...

And then you start reading Part I and you find stuff and problems that you have known about and that you have felt on your day to day basis, and how well they are explained. Plain English that everyone can understand, growing pace on knowledge that the author start introducing without me perceiving the fact. Eventually you realize you are understanding things that you never imagined that you would understand in the first reading, and you do not have to go over it again and again to understand what is being said. When you finish reading a part, you get the feeling that you learned a lot....

BIG QUESTION: Why do I think that reading this book is important? The US is a very big country and everyone speaks the same language, they tend to forget that there are other languages in the world, besides English. In Europe where I live the countries are smaller, and they all have different languages and customs. The European Community is opening many markets for developers, because many companies are expanding to other countries in the EC, and the ones that don't follow this trend will surely be crippled. Companies are thinking more and more about having clients in different countries with unique languages and customs. In the same way, the WWW is opening an even more vast market, almost in the same manner.

Even if you don't have an immediate need for a international application, it is far better to know what can be done and what are the problems are that you will be facing, and the book will help you perceive this problems. And if you are urgently in need of developing such applications, the book gives hands on solutions, with lots of examples ready to work that will save you a lot of time. This will let you concentrate much more on the application and not so much on the internationalization of it.

Please excuse my bad English, Pedro Gil Read more ›

I have been developing with Basic since VB 3.0 was released. One complaint I always had was that it simply did not support anything international. Sure, they added a few functions with each release and StrConv could do some nice tricks, but you were on your own if you wanted to do anything complicated. MSDN would include lots of documentation that was great for C++ developers, but if you used VB, you had to suffer.

Now, Michael has produced a text that has the same power as Nadine Kano's book on International C++ development, only in VB. It discusses all the concepts you need to understand. in plain english. Then it takes you through important international issues:

*Formats for numbers, dates, and currency values
*Calendars
*Fonts on VB forms
*Calling Unicode APIs
*Localization
*Jet 4.0
*SQL Server 2000

He takes you through Unicode and the confusion of multiple code pages. He is the only person who has ever documented using MLang and Uniscribe; Microsoft support claims you cannot do it! He even dabbles in VBScript and its SetLocale function. The book includes important issues on content and how to make sure it will be acceptable in other countries. Perhaps most importantly, he includes information on testing international applications I have not seen in any book, ever. Most VB books do not even mention testing at all. The woman he credits with helping him with the chapter on testing gets my thanks, too!

Best of all, he provides the international keyboard layouts! Just like Nadine's book, only he has a lot more of them. I guess that is the advantage of a book that is released later?

I have seen Michael actively answering questions in the newsgroups. He fulfills an important need for people who have questions on international issues.... It is obvious that there is no one who has the same breadth of knowledge as he does. To quote Microsoft's Chris Pratley from his foreword: "If you do globalization work, you'll find just a single page of this book worth the price."

This book is the definitive work on making VB an international product. By the end of the book, I felt like I could take over the world with a VB app or something. It was quite simply that good! Read more ›

I do not actually focus on a lot of the core functionality, but I showed the sections on internationalization and databases to the people who have to manage those parts of the project and they both tried to steal my copy of the book. They finally gave up and decided to go buy their own - I wonder if I get a royalty for referring them? [I found out that I do not, too bad].

The database person gave me some specific information that he liked about the book: the information on SQL Server, especially SQL Server 2000. Its superior support for collations over Oracle is helping him convince the powers that be to move to SQL Server so that we can use this functionality.

I am not sure about some of the negative reviews I see up on the Amazon site, they do not really include very much detail on what they found wrong with the book. I have even e-mailed the author to ask him, and he is not sure either -- he said that this person did not respond to an e-mail asking for details. I know that if an author e-mailed me, I would be flattered enough to answer! I do notice that Michael does seem to ramble sometimes, but I think that is just because he really seems to genuinely enjoy the "global" arena....

One of my co-workers saw him at the Informant conference in Phoenix -- same presentation that he gave in London as well -- and said he clearly knew his stuff when it came to Access, and I think its pretty clear he knows about VB as well. He also seems to speak at user groups on a regular basis, too.

I have to keep digging to get the rest of the information (and eventually read the other chapters in the book that are not in my area) but from what I see this is a "must have". Read more ›