Recently in programming Category

i figure i'd start using my blog to jot down some notes regarding programming stuff since I really don't have a good place to put all these things... it'll also force me to start using my blog again which i haven't really kept up with in... oh, about 18 months?

anyway....

so i'm doing some programming in Visual Studio and have noticed one very annoying thing... everything is changing from standard ascii character sets to unicode, which i supposed is a push to standardized the way characters are represented. this has caused microsoft to add new functions which causes compiler errors if you're not using the appropriate ones. in any case, i thought i might point this out, and a simple fix if you don't want to deal with the unicode conversion is to go into the compiler settings and change the character set from unicode to multi-byte... here's some useful information from codeproject:

"In order to allow your programs to be used in international markets it is worth making your application Unicode or MBCS aware. The Unicode character set is a "wide character" (2 bytes per character) set that contains every character available in every language, including all technical symbols and special publishing characters. Multibyte character set (MBCS) uses either 1 or 2 bytes per character and is used for character sets that contain large numbers of different characters (eg Asian language character sets).

Which character set you use depends on the language and the operating system. Unicode requires more space than MBCS since each character is 2 bytes. It is also faster than MBCS and is used by Windows NT as standard, so non-Unicode strings passed to and from the operating system must be translated, incurring overhead. However, Unicode is not supported on Win95 and so MBCS may be a better choice in this situation. Note that if you wish to develop applications in the Windows CE environment then all applications must be compiled in Unicode."

read more here!