Hi All,

Our (VFP9 SP2) application currently is available in several languages already but now it seems we got some serious interest from the Asian market. Several chinese parties are interested in using our application given that it needs to be translated in 'Simplified Chinese'.


I'm aware that this is a total different balgame than other 'western' languages as this requires a double byte characterset.


I've read some articles (ie from Steven black) explaning the settings to make in Windows to make this work.

So far I got the following environment requirements to start development:

* Creating a VM machine and set the language to simplified chinese. Also the setting for non-unicode applications need to be set to simplified chinese.
* Setting our SQL server database collation to "Chinese simplified ...."
* Set autotranslate = NO in the SQL connection string

Also we need to make sure we use fonts that are capable of displaying chines characters. We mainly use Arial, Tahoma and Segoe UI. Does anyone know whether there are problems with that?
We only support Windows 7 or later, Windows Server 2008 or later. SQL server 2005 or later.

I guess we need to make sure our character fields are wide enough.But since in general you need less asian characters to describe names, I'm not sure whether that is neccesary.

The problem might be that we have to go through the whole application for string functions and replace them with string functions supporting double bytes. Since this app has a few million lines of code this would be an issue not to take lightly.


So, far I got the knowns and the know unknowns, but I'm scared of the unknown unknowns. IOW, since it will be the first time doing this what other complications can we expect?

Also, any Chinese VFP programmer looking for a job, please give me a buzz.


Walter,