Hall's Homework

If you sign up for the Bill Hall's extension course, this is the kind of take-home assignment you can expect. If a seminar is conducted by Hall at your workplace, chances are he'll run out of time and you're off the hook.

• Write a program that runs in Windows 95 and displays all 64,000 Unicode characters. This exercise shows that even Windows 95 has enough Unicode support to do some interesting things.
• Write a program that will display all characters, including the double-byte ones where applicable, for all installed code pages on your system. You must use Unicode to accomplish this task and the program must run in Windows 95. (This problem illustrates the programming model used in web browsers and in some recent applications such as Microsoft Office 97 and Adobe Photoshop 4.)
• Develop a dialog application that will enumerate all installed locales, and for each locale, display date, time, currency, and number in formats that are culturally correct. You must use both native Win32 and C-library functions. For the latter, use the Posix support built into Windows 95 and Windows NT.
• Write a one-line editor that allows you to switch keyboards among several languages. The resulting line of text must show all characters correctly no matter what writing systems are being used. If you have a Far East system, see if you can make it work with double-byte characters (Hint: Think about how you can use Unicode to make this easier).
• Localize the Windows version of "Hello, World" to French. You can simulate translations by tagging the text with a language name: "Hello, World (English)," "Hello, Word (French)," and so on. Use multilingual resources and language DLLs, controlling the languages being compiled by using the predefined manifests AFX_RESOURCE_DLL, AFX_TARG_ENU, and the like found in Visual C++ generated resource files.

-- D.W.

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