International Resource Identifier Support in .NET 3.5

The September 2007 issue MSDN Magazine contains an interesting article about changes to the System.Net namespace. Among the discussion about sockets and other low-level changes, the authors discuss support for International Resource Identifiers (IRIs) and their benefits over URIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/09/Networking/default.aspx

I didn't realise it was possible to use non-ASCII characters in a domain name and while many DNS servers don't support non-ASCII domain names, Punicode provides a mechanism to work around this limitation.

So in essence, you can now take a domain name containing Unicode characters (like this: http://微軟香.com) and work with it directly using the URI class. This is certainly a great thing for international visitors to our web sites but as I only read English and French, I was really clinging to the English URLs as the last remaining way to identify our pages in SharePoint! Ah well, modern times, 'tis a global world...