Of course, every software developer knows, that there are many different character sets out there. And of course, every developer takes actions to handle multiple character sets.

And of course, we do too. At least that is what we thought until some prospect tried our software on a chinese operating system. And unfortunately, some of our functionality failed. Up to now, we thought, that we are safe, because we were using UTF-8 encoding and Unicode whereever we handle strings. But the reality proved that we are wrong.

So we set up a chinese Windows server and started with our testing. And we had the same behaviour. Our remote login agent did not forward the information collected to the discovery server and therefore, there was information missing in the inventory database. After some sleepless and frustrating nights, we found out, that we used one function from the C-library that was supposed to work fine with unicode characters, but in fact, it didn’t… We simply moved to a different Windows API function and then it worked fine!

That little story is just to say “THANK YOU” to the chinese engineer. He invested a significant amount of time to test our software and thanks to his feedback, we were able to get ready for the Chinese market and I pretty sure that he knows that we are writing about him, when he reads this post…