i18n – Vesic.Org

Import multiple VCF contacts into Gmail with Windows 7

One of rather frequent tasks is import of existing contacts from other sources into newly created Gmail account.

There are lot of tools (Gmail offer that as well) for two-way synhronization between various applications (Outlook and such), but one time, one way (Desktop -> Gmail) is not covered very well.

So, task is simple: import multiple VCF (vCard) contacts into Gmail contacts.

I will use Windows Contacts as an example inside Windows 7 (Nokia PC Suite can synhronize contacts in your phone with Windows Contacts) but procedure can be applied to any set of *.vcf files.

Get Windows Contacts into *.vcf format

Open Windows Contacts
Select “Organize / Select All“
Select Export
Select “vCards (folder of .vcf files)“
Click on Export

You will be asked to select folder where all contacts wil be exported as .vcf files:

Let’s assume that you created new folder Cards on C: drive and exported *.vcf there. Also, create another subfolder of Cards folder – Final.

So, new structure is C:CardsFinal with bunch of *.vcf files into C:Cards

Combine all *.vcf files into one big file

Next step is to combine all *.vcf files into one big file.

Open Windows Explored and locate C:Cards. Press and hold Shift key and right-click with mouse anywhere in folder and select option “Open command window here“:

Don’t get scared by black window you got; you need to type just one short command:

copy /b *.vcf FinalBig.Vcf

Merge multiple files

You can close command windows after this.

If you are English speaking person and have no strange characters in names of your contacts, you can stop here – use C:CardsFinalBig.vcf as source of import in Gmail Contacts and you are fine.

However, most of us non-English speaking should do final step: proper conversion of file.

Convert big vcf file into UTF8

We will use Powershell for this final step.

Press Start, type Powershell and select Windows PowerShell. Now you will be presented with blue 🙂 screen. Type following sequence of commands, pressing Enter on end of every line (or do copy / paste)

cd CardsFinal get-content "Big.Vcf" | out-file -encoding "UTF8" -filepath "ConvertedBig.Vcf"

That is it – import your file C:CardsFinalConvertedBig.Vcf into Gmail contacts 🙂

Transliteration easy way – Microsoft Transliteration Utility

If you are lucky enough 🙂 to have not one, but two alphabets in daily use, your regular task in programming will be transliteration – transformation of text from one script (alphabet) to another.

In Serbia, we are using Latin as well as Cyrillic alphabet (and that is not same Cyrillic as Russian one) and common task is conversion from one to another and vice-versa.

This is not too complicated request; you can easily create necessary procedures; however, there is a better way:

Microsoft Transliteration Utility (MTU) is not widely known, but very useful tool for just that purpose: transliteration. It can easily transliterate text either typed in a text box or from one file to another.

There is set of predefined translations:

Serbian Cyrillic to Latin / Serbian Latin to Cyrillic
Bosnian Cyrillic to Latin / Bosnian Latin to Cyrillic
Hangul to Romanization
Inuktitut to Romanization / Romanization to Inuktitut
Malayalam to Romanization / Romanization to Malayalam

You are not limited to above set; you can easily create your own translations, using Module Development Console:

(click on image for larger version)

Creating simple textual file, you can use full power of MTU’s parsing engine: definitions of input and output characters, rules for transliteration including definitions of new states for translation state machine.

This is not the end – you can even use MTU programmatically (although please check EULA for commercial usage):

Add reference to MSTranslitTools.DLL (it can be found in %programfiles%Microsoft Transliteration Utility)
Add using System.NaturalLanguage.Tools;
Current translation files (.tms) can be found in %CommonProgramFiles%TransliterationModulesMicrosoft
Here is simple code fragment to demonstrate:

TransliteratorSpecification specification =
   TransliteratorSpecification.FromSpecificationFile("Serbian Latin to Cyrillic.tms");

Transliterator transliterator = Transliterator.FromSpecification(specification);
string rezultat = transliterator.Transliterate("Vesic.Org");

Console.WriteLine(rezultat);

Breaking changes for language codes in KB928365, KB928366

.Net Framework Some security updates are not just security updates.

If you installed (or you have Automatic Update turned on) yesterday’s updates:

KB928365 – Security update for the .NET Framework 2.0 for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000
KB928366 – Security update for the .NET Framework 1.1 for Windows XP and Windows 2000

you will get security update (nice) and breaking changes (not so nice) regarding some of the languages in the framework. More precise, some of specific cultures changed their codes:

LCID	Old code	New code	Old / New description
2074	sr-SP-Latn	sr-Latn-CS	Serbian (Latin, Serbia and Montenegro) / Serbian (Latin, Serbia)
3098	sr-SP-Cyrl	sr-Cyrl-CS	Serbian (Cyrillic, Serbia and Montenegro) / Serbian (Cyrillic, Serbia)
1068	az-AZ-Latn	az-Latn-AZ	Azeri (Latin, Azerbaijan)
1091	uz-UZ-Latn	uz-Latn-UZ	Uzbek (Latin, Uzbekistan)
1025	div-MV	dv-MV	Divehi (Maldives)
2092	az-AZ-Cyrl	az-Cyrl-AZ	Azeri (Cyrillic, Azerbaijan)
2115	uz-UZ-Cyrl	uz-Cyrl-UZ	Uzbek (Cyrillic, Uzbekistan)
7194	sr-BA-Cyrl	sr-Cyrl-BA	Serbian (Cyrillic) (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
5146	bs-BA-Latn	bs-Latn-BA	Bosnian (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
6170	sr-BA-Latn	sr-Latn-BA	Serbian (Latin) (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
9225	en-CB	en-029	English (Caribbean)

(this Caribbean change looks very suspicious, but code says so)

Those changes will cause you problems if you have satellite assemblies for given languages in your application – after client installs update(s), those translations will simply cease to work – recompile and distribution of new ones is mandatory.

I appreciate updates but some sort of warning or information on official patch pages would be, at least, nice.