I am doing a small application for a friend that accesses his Google calendar. Developing it in Visual Studio 2010, as a WinForms project, compiled against FrameWork 3.0, so my friend can use it on a PC running Win XP. I am located in S.E. Asia.
The Google Calendar created by my friend uses English for all its entries.
I successfully capture the Calendar's XML using the typical WebRequest, and StreamReader objects: no problem there.
The problem is that the XML returned includes Calendar Event entry-data encoded in a non-Roman character Asian font: I assume this is happening because Google is reading my IP address, and "decides" I must want the Event data back in the native character set of the country I am in.
Observations:
0. changing the Calendar link prefix from "https:" to "http:" has no effect on the XML returned.
1. In the current XML returned I can see both Unicode coded characters in "#1234" format, and glyphs in the Asian non-Roman font.
2. Adding "?lan=en" to the end of the Calendar link does not result in English-only XML. That was one suggestion I found on Google's developer site.
3. If I launch Chrome and enter the link to the calendar feed: all XML content is returned in English only. So the problem is somehow specific to making a WebRequest from ".NET"
4. If I try the link in Internet Explorer 9, the resulting page does display non-Roman alphabet content.
So, the question is: how to force Google to return English-language only results from pulling down a Google Calendar feed in XML format, from .NET using WebRequest.
thanks ! Bill