Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/09
My CodeRage 4 session materials are available for download:
CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. while I write this :-)
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).
Let me know if you download, and what you are using the sample code for.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, CodeRage, CommandLine, Conferences, Database Development, Debugging, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, Firebird, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, Software Development, Source Code Management, SQL Server, TFS (Team Foundation System), Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/05/08
Recently when receiving information from a StUF webservice created by a large Dutch provider of government IT systems, we had an issue with characters having their high bit set.
Although the web-service pretended to send their information as UTF-8, in fact they were encoding using a form of ISO_8859.
The most likely character set they used is ISO-8859-1 (since that is the default encoding for the HTTP protocol), but it might also be ISO-8859-15 which is an adaption of ISO-8859-1 trading some typographic characters for the euro-sign and some characters from French and some characters used for transliteration of Russian, Finnish and Estonian.
(note that the printable characters of both ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 can be displayed by the Windows-1252 code page)
Since it is not possible to reliably “guess” the right encoding (there are way to many possibilities, even IsTextUnicode that is used by Notepad fails, see below), the only way is to use a fixed reencoding that depends on the StUF data provider. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Windows Development, XML, XML/XSD | 5 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/04/23
Quite a while ago, we needed to exchange some text files with .NET and a DOS application (yes, they still exist!).
Since the .NET app already exchanged text files with other applications using UTF8, we had to reencode those into plain ASCII.
(yes, I am aware there are dozens of codepages we could encode to, we decided to stick with 7-bit ASCII, and warned the client about possible information loss).
A couple of months later, we neede to exchange information with an app doing Windows-1252, and then even later on to a web-app needing ISO 8859-1 (both are Western European encodings).
So I decided to refactor the UTF8 to ASCII conversion app into something more maintainable.
But first let me show you how you can dump all of the .NET supported encodings:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, ASCII, C#, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | 3 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 