Foreword & Preface
Microsoft’s International Project Engineer Jesper Holmberg provides a short and sweet introductory paragraph. Jesper laments about the difficulties developers faced when attempting to “Internationalise” applications in the Win32 era. He goes on to confirm that the .NET Framework is not the panacea to our internationalisation woes and that as developers, we still have to possess a good understanding of the issues behind culture-independence and localisation. Mention of two definitive texts, Code Complete (Steve McConnell) and Writing Secure Code (Michael Howard) suggests Jesper believes that .NET Internationalisation deserves similar pride of place on your bookshelf.
The book’s author then provides a 3-4 page Preface that explains the real need for internationalisation, citing facts such as France, Quebec and Canada have laws prohibiting the hosting of English-only web-sites. Guy makes good use of these interesting facts throughout the book, they serve to keep the reader interested, and they certainly worked for me. He then goes on to extol the virtues of Visual Studio 2003, choosing to remind us of its lack of internationalisation support for ASP.NET applications, something that was rectified in Visual Studio 2005.
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