Been a while since my last post, no?
Anyway, over on Michael Kaplan's blog, he's got a post titled "What is the name of that character?" where he answers a question from the MSDN Forums. Basically, someone was asking "How can you get the name of a particular Unicode character, in Windows?".
Michael's answer was that Windows (and .NET) don't provide any public methods to do this. So I decided that I'd write up a quick .NET application which does it the "hard" way.
Download UnicodeName.zip, which contains both a .NET 1.1 binary and source code for a program which downloads the NamesList.txt file from the Unciode Character Database, parses it into an easy-to-use array and then lets you query it for the names of various characters.
Now, my code is really simple, and there's probably plenty of bugs, but it should be a decent starting point. It even caches the results so that the next time you run it, it doesn't have to go through the trouble of downloading the list all over again (it takes a while to process - you'll notice the first time you run it, there's a couple of seconds delay while it parses the file).
So feel free to use my code in your own apps, though I wouldn't mind a quick email or comment below letting me know what you're doing with it :)