Michael Kaplan is a developer at Microsoft, working on both Windows and the .Net framework, centering on Unicode and international support. He has written dozens of articles on international development issues and is the author of the book Internationalization with Visual Basic from Sams Publishing. He has also spoken at conferences around the world. Prior to joining Microsoft, he did consulting as the chief software architect of Trigeminal Software, Inc., working on many interesting projects such as the principal developer for the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/ME Systems.