Unicode for Multilanguage Support in VB.NET

[dougcoulter]

Hello everyone. I am looking to get started on a VB.NET application that will require the display and storage of multi language characters. I am relatively new to VB.NET, but I have gathered that it natively supports unicode.

At this point I would like to know how to access foreign characters for display (say in a button, label and/or text box). In addition, I would like to store some unicode information in an MSDE table via ADO.NET. Can anyone provide me with some suggestions? I am pretty familiar with ADO.NET, but just unsure of how to incorporate unicode.

Thanks so much...

Doug Coulter

 

[chiph]

All the .NET languages are natively Unicode (UCS2, I think). If you're trying to find a Unicode-enabled text editor in order to generate some sample Unicode text .. look no further than Notepad. (the SaveAs menu has an option to specify your encoding). The Character Map tool is also useful. If you want a true Unicode text editor, UniPad (

http://www.unipad.org)

does a good job, and is free for documents under 1000 glyphs (otherwise it's $99).

To store Unicode data in a database, the columns must be able to hold Unicode data. In SQL Server you declare the column of type nchar or nvarchar. You can do the same in Oracle, but I forget their names for it. I doubt FoxPro, MS-Access, etc. will be able to hold Unicode data except in a BLOB field (nasty).

Chip H.

 

[dougcoulter]

Thanks for the insights Chip - very helpful !