Acknowledgments

Writing a reference book that covers various areas and technologies, while remaining technically pertinent and accurate, requires the involvement of many people. This book has been put together and, in large part, written by the World-Ready Guides (WRG) team-David K. Hsu, Houman Pournasseh, Björn Rettig, Russell D. Rolfe, and Rostislav Shabalin-in the Microsoft Windows Division, who are also responsible for the Dr. International column on the Global Software Development Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev. That's why Dr. International was chosen to be the honorific author of this book. However, it must be pointed out that many people have extensively contributed to this book's realization.

First, we would like to thank the Windows Globalization Services team who made Windows the best platform for multilingual computing and demystified some of the latest globalization technologies for us. Special thanks to John McConnell and his team who helped us better understand the Microsoft .NET Framework globalization services, MLang, and Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU); Mohammed El-Gammal for his help with the "Graphics Device Interface Plus (GDI+)" chapter of this book; and Edward Ye for his contribution to the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) content.

The Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework teams have done an outstanding job in releasing the latest version of this development tool suite and working environment earlier this year. Kathleen Carey, Mohamed Hassanin, Fran ois Liger, Marin Millar, and Achim Ruopp's continuous help and support were greatly appreciated. The .NET logo throughout the book is a footprint of their contribution.

Without Uniscribe, handling complex scripts would have never been as easy and staightforward as it is today. The Uniscribe team's, enlightened support and guidance regarding Uniscribe's implementation and functionality have been outstanding. Special thanks to Worachai Chaoweeraprasit, Tarek Mahmoud Sayed, and David C. Brown, the father of Uniscribe.

WRG works closely with Windows localization and localizability teams to foster internationalization inside Microsoft. These teams' efforts, from the actual translation of software all the way to creating pseudo-localized builds, have enabled Microsoft Windows XP to be released into 34 languages within a short period of time after the English version was released. Our special thanks to Mohamed Elgazzar, Jan Roelof Falkena, and Stefanie Schiller for their help with the pseudo-localization and localization chapters of this book. It's amazing to see how much font technology has changed during recent years. The Microsoft Typography team is today extensively involved in providing support for additional scripts. Fonts that this team creates are used across different products in Microsoft. Our thanks and appreciation to David Glenn, Apurva Joshi, Paul Nelson, and the rest of the team for their contribution to this book.

Program managers in Microsoft subsidiary offices across different countries play a key role in defining future designs as well as country-specific and locale-specific feature implementations. We would like to thank them for their input and feedback. Our special thanks to Shane Casserly, Neil Powell, and Dominic Smyth.

Also, we would like to thank F. Avery Bishop for his useful and relevant published articles that this book borrows, Fran oise Botale-Hovivian for the chapter on content localizability, Fernando Caro from the SQL team, Kevin Gjerstad from the Microsoft Windows Text Services Framework (TSF) team, Chris Lovett for his work on the "Extensible Markup Language (XML)" chapter, Gwyneth Marshall from the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team, Chris Pratley from the Microsoft Office team, Mohamed Sadek for his review of the "Mirroring" chapter, Murray Sargent from the Rich Edit team, Chris Wendt for his contribution to the "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" chapter, Michael Kaplan for his indefatigable review work and inspiration for many good discussions, and of course Nadine Kano for writing the first edition of this book and inspiring us to write this update.

And finally, we would like to thank Susan Joly, our editor from TCCI; Amy Shear and Joel Panchot of Microsoft Press, our production artists; Juliana Aldous, our project manager at Microsoft Press; as well as Kurt Stephan, Melissa von Tschudi-Sutton, and Maureen Zimmerman from the Microsoft Press editorial team for their help, support, and patience.

Internationalization is a vast project that involves a large number of great developers, testers, and managers here at Microsoft. The World-Ready Guides only spread the word on internationalization requirements; the credit goes to those who actually implement them. Our sincere thanks to all of those not mentioned specifically by name.

-Dr. International