Chapter 2. Unicode, Windows, and the .NET Framework

OUR INDUSTRY HAS A HUMBLE BEGINNING. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set that underlies the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) upon which DOS was built included upper and lower characters for the English language alone. We have come a long way since then. In this chapter, you will learn about the operating environment in which your .NET application will run, including Unicode, Microsoft Windows support for Unicode, different language versions of Microsoft Windows, and different language versions of the .NET Framework.