I'm delighted to say that I will be delivering a new presentation at Gloucestershire .NET User Group on Wednesday 8th May 2013 and at DevTeach in Toronto on 28/29/30th May 2013. It is a presentation I have been wanting to put together for a few years but until recently I hadn't had the time. In the immortal words of Sun Tzu in The Art Of War 2500 years ago (translated from the original Chinese) "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster".

• Globalization: Know Your Enemy
  Metaphorically speaking, the world is shrinking every day. Ironically this means that it is getting less acceptable to brush aside cultural differences and pretend that all cultures are essentially English but with different words. Appreciating globalization is about achieving humility, understanding that the world is a lot bigger than most developers give it credit for. Most developers understand that different cultures use different date formats, number formats and currencies. However, how many developers do not know that postal code formats, phone number formats, address formats and person name formats also differ. Not to mention the issues of localizing for gender-based languages or languages with less simplistic plural forms. What about ordinal subscripts, ordinal words, alphabet character sets ? The intention of this session is to open eyes, provide globalization enlightenment and with luck it will scare the living bejeezus out of you enough to make you question every line of code you write.

See you there.

As from today you can download an alpha of NCLDR (see http://www.ncldr.com).

NCLDR is an open source port of CLDR to the .NET Framework. CLDR is the Common Locale Data Repository, a considerable database of culture data maintained by the Unicode Consortium and used by the rest of the non-Microsoft developer community. As such CLDR is analogous to the System.Globalization namespace in the .NET Framework with the difference that CLDR has nearly twice the number of cultures and has solutions for globalization and localization problems that the .NET Framework does not. NCLDR brings these cultures and these solutions to the .NET Framework.

There are a number of short videos on the NCLDR website that will help you get up to speed. The source code is on GitHub. There is also a NuGet package (search for pre-release packages).

Clearly this is an alpha release and it illustrates the potential of such a port but it isn't finished yet by a long way and I am looking for feedback of any kind on this project.

Enjoy.