Using Custom Cultures

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

This article—Using Custom Cultures—is from .NET Internationalization: The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications, by Guy Smith-Ferrier. Copyright © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.  Read the book review!

.NET Internationalization: Using Custom Cultures

The CultureInfo class is at the heart of .NET's internationalization solution. In Chapter 6, "Globalization," you saw that in the .NET Framework 2.0, the list of available cultures is a combination of those cultures known to the .NET Framework plus those known to the operating system. In the .NET Framework 1.1, the list of available cultures is simply those known only to the .NET Framework. These cultures are fine if the country/language combination that you need is one of the available cultures and if the information for that combination is correct for your application. But there are many country/language combinations that are not available, and some of those that are available might not have the correct information for your application. For this reason, custom cultures were introduced in the .NET Framework 2.0. A custom culture is a culture that is defined by an application developer instead of Microsoft. After it is created, the .NET Framework treats it as a first-class citizen and the custom culture is just as valid as any other culture. In this chapter, we look at how to create, register/unregister, and deploy custom cultures. The story for .NET Framework 1.1 applications is not so sophisticated. It is possible to create custom cultures in the .NET Framework 1.1, but the results are less than satisfactory. This subject is covered at the end of this chapter.