Keith Pleas Blog

You hit the main one -- just about every app I did while I was there required translation. Often the spec read, "The ability to change between the official languages at any time - including while you're in a dialog".

Other than that, and magical, merry tax laws (many of the Maritime provinces us 'Harmonized' Taxes - 14%), while most other provinces use the two (PST/GST) - with PST varying between provinces). Except Alberta (no PST).

Interest should be the same -- perhaps more ASP.NET (I hope)

I know you know these folks, but maybe don't know they are in Toronto. You should ping Kate Gregory (RD, Toronto & INETA speaker), Eli & Marcie Robillard, Dave Totzke, Joel Semeniuk (not Toronoto,but another Canadian RD) and Craig Flanagan (MS) for a real insiders scoop

Localization,Localization,Localization.

Sometimes to the point of silliness.
"The search must search in both languages, but should only search in the non selected languge if there are less than X results in the selected language."
"Changing language in the search page must not re-search, but must re-sort the results by the language specific name"

The sites I have worked on that did/do not suppport multiple languages were for TV chanels where the French and Eglish versions had different domains and justified multiple front ends and some sites selling prescription medication to Americans :P

Often the apps must be more that bilingual, they must be fully multi-lingual with initial supprt for English and French.

Localization meaning not only language issues but also things like date formats. You can't hardcode formats in prompts, for example. There's also the matter of units in general, metric vs imperial.

The other issue is the new privacy legislation, which may be prompting some solutions to have more encryption in them, or to store less information about customers in the database. Both of those can put pressure on developers.

The other thing I see is that there's a greater use of things like debit cards, doing your taxes and banking online, and so on, which means the bar is higher in terms of expectations. The first year I could submit my firm's T4s online I was superexcited -- and then immediately demanded to know why I had to retype it and couldn't it be some web service that my accounting software called? (And the next year, it was.)

Kate

Yup - Kate hit on a potentially big difference with privacy. You can check out the privacy commissioner's site at http://www.privcom.gc.ca/legislation/02_06_01_01_e.asp

But if you want the quick scoop - here it is:

Under PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), personal information must be:

1) collected with consent and for a reasonable purpose
- This means that at every point in which you collect information (reg forms, customer profile forms, etc), you should have an "opt-in" consent for use of that information. Your marketers should be providing you with this.

2) used and disclosed for the limited purpose for which it was collected
- This one is big for your marketing team, but for developers, this could affect the way in which you tag information in your database, as you collect it.

3) accurate

4)accessible for inspection and correction
- How easily can you pull information from your database(s) for inspection?

5) stored securely
- to Kate's point, how secure is your data? To get more information on building secure ASP.NET applications, watch for an MSDN Canada event series: "MSDN Canada Briefing" which is travelling across Canada in the spring.

There are probably more implications to developers, if you can think of any, please add on.

Thanks,
Craig.

Great info! I'm doing the MSDN security event in Toronto on Feb 25th with SteveB and plan on knowing those privacy laws very well.

It's actually really nice chatting with people that really appreciate all the nice ways you can localize your apps in .NET, and globalization with dates, etc.. is great!

Thanks for the blog entry!

Don't forget - "z" is zed and not zee.

Not so technical, but equally important things for planning a conference up here...
-we have a really good sense of humour and appreciate being entertained while educated.
-development teams are generally smaller up here. Not that we don't have all the same issues as 150 person teams do - but we make do with less.
-hockey is very important to us and VSLive falls smack dab in the middle of the playoff.s There are likely going to be at least 2 cdn teams still in the playoffs during VSLive and if one of them is Toronto - then evening bof sessions aren't going to be as highly attended during HNIC.