Re: unicode support, anyone else who was around programming Win32 5-10 years
ago (before .NET) might join me in offering a wary word of caution: the
otherwise-disarming "let's just support both in one runtime" philosophy can
be taken too far. In the nightmare scenario (which was reality until Windows
9x finally died an overdue death) you end up with two versions of every
library function that takes a string. (This when we now have like 3
contenders for a standard library and n GUI toolkit bindings!)
I'll take a couple days to try to reason out more specifically about how
that got so out of control, but I just want to note that there is a
precedent for trying to have a sympatric speciation between ASCII and
unicode software and, while it was necessary for historical reasons, it was
pretty godawful to deal with!

Bitter and traumatized,
Mike