Product Description

Internationalization with Visual Basic is designed to get the Visual Basic developer into the realm of applications that can run in different locales and even process data from multiple locales.

Internationalization with Visual Basic explains how to create a Visual Basic application that will support the international marketplace. The readers will learn the important differences between globalization, multinationalization, and localization and how each affects their application. The book explains these concepts in detail while teaching the reader how to build an international application in Visual Basic. Readers will learn the importance basic user interface issues as well as going beyond the default language setting to handle these global issues. Included at the end of the book is an extensive reference section that will include valuable resources and links, character references, language identifiers, and various currency, date, and calendar formats.

• Specific topics covered will include:
• Using calendars
• Regional settings
• Building localized applications
• Handling localized resources with satellite DLLs
• Handling external formats
• Web interface issues
• Extending ASP with components and services
• Creating documentation and using HTML help

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #578776 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-27
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 650 pages

From the Back Cover

Internationalization with Visual Basic is designed to get the Visual Basic developer into the realm of applications that can run in different locales and even process data from multiple locales.

Internationalization with Visual Basic explains how to create a Visual Basic application that will support the international marketplace. The readers will learn the important differences between globalization, multinationalization, and localization and how each affects their application. The book explains these concepts in detail while teaching the reader how to build an international application in Visual Basic. Readers will learn the importance basic user interface issues as well as going beyond the default language setting to handle these global issues. Included at the end of the book is an extensive reference section that will include valuable resources and links, character references, language identifiers, and various currency, date, and calendar formats.

• Specific topics covered will include:
• Using calendars
• Regional settings
• Building localized applications
• Handling localized resources with satellite DLLs
• Handling external formats
• Web interface issues
• Extending ASP with components and services
• Creating documentation and using HTML help

About the Author

Michael Kaplan is the owner and lead developer of Trigeminal Software, Inc., a software consulting company that focuses on all types of solutions in Microsoft Visual Basic, Access, and SQL Server, especially relating to internationalization/localization and replication.

He is a former member of the Microsoft Access development team who oversaw the merge of Far East code changes that were merged into the US English wizards. He later developed the international standards for the wizards in Microsoft Access, and later was the primary developer for the creation of the worldwide wizards. He has worked on the localization of Visual Basic add-ins for Microsoft Access, and SQL Server and wrote the localization framework that is used widely throughout Microsoft.

His Web site, www.trigeminal.com , is a proof of concept for many of the web, database, and Visual Basic component solutions that focus on I18N and localization. The site will change its language based on user settings, in addition to being a repository of knowledge, sample code, and utilities for Visual Basic and Access developers.

Customer Reviews

VB conciliation with the world
When I found out that Michael Kaplan was writing a book, I was a little bit scared, not because I thought he lacked the knowledge to do so, like some reviews on Amazon suggest, but because there would be too much knowledge, and what if I would have problems understanding the issues? Even though most of the articles that I've read from him didn't make me feel that way, but it's different to write a 600 page book than writing just an article. Even if the book did prove to be very complex, that would not take away from either the value of the content of the book or the ability of the author. Something like that happened to me when I first read Dan Appleman API book, and now it's one of my references on the subject, but I had to read many things before I could understood what Dan was trying to accomplish.

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

A must have for developers considering Multinational support
We would not have been able to solve a lot of our multinational support problems without this book. The content is superb and covers all of the issues you are likely to encounter writing Multinational Apps in VB. It explains everything from code pages to problems with the VB forms engine and gives clear and instructive knowledge about the problems faced by VB developers. The Author responds quickly to enquires and is very helpful. I recommend this book to any developer trying to come to terms with Multinational support in VB (and other development languages).

The Bible of Internationalisation for Visual Basic
After reading numerous articles from VBPJ, I already had respect for Michael Kaplan regarding his knowledge for Internationalisation (i18N) for Visual Basic and this respect continues after reading this book. His writing style is conversational and informal and this makes reading a great deal easier. The book is split up into five key parts. The first part describing Globalization is a must read for any Visual Basic developer as it will give you guidelines on how to program VB more effectively day to day and make the transition to a i18N enabled application much more smoother if you need it to. The second part talks much about Unicode and codepages and where the Visual Basic forms engine falls in a heap with Unicode characters and how to get around this problem. The third part talks about localisation (L10N) and how you can take your existing user interface and localise it into different languages. This is probably where the book is worth its weight in gold as the CD contains an add-in that trawls through your forms and converts them into Dialog resources which can then be handed to localisers for translation. Parts four and five contain information and gotchas with Database access and ASP issues, an area I didn't really read much into only because the project didn't require it.

I would highly recommend this book to add to your Classic VB bookshelf as it contains a wealth of information, guidelines and recommendations to take your application into the rest of the world.