Part of my company’s product involves using Windows PE, the bootable-from-a-CD Windows environment Microsoft licenses to companies for products like Symantec Ghost. It’s basically equivalent to the Bart PE project, but it’s officially supported by MS.

The environment you get when running under Windows PE is very limited, and changing that limited environment is tricky. In my case, I need to run some code I wrote in Visual C++ 2005, which is dependent upon the Visual C++ runtime DLLs, atl80.dll, msvcm80.dll, msvcp80.dll, and msvcr80.dll. For various reasons I won’t go into, I don’t have the option to statically link to the runtimes and thus avoid the DLL dependencies in the first place.

My current project in Iraq is the first time I’ve developed software in another language, and more to the point, in a non-Latin character set.

Our alphabet, which we share with the Latin-based languages of Western Europe and South America, is based on the Latin alphabet of Roman times, which is why we call our character set ‘Latin’ and not ‘English’ or whatever. There are plenty of other alphabets out there, including Cyrillic (used by Russian, among others) and Arabic.

Each of these alphabets, in order to be represented in digital form, has at least one (and, confusingly, sometimes more than one) ‘code page’, which simply means a standard translation of each letter in the alphabet into a number. So, a latin ‘A’ in almost all Latin code pages is assigned the number 65, while the Arabic beh (ب) is assigned its own number in Arabic code pages.