Set CultureInfo for winform application.

Jay S

I've googled this for ages with no set answer/solution.

I have a simple C# application which has a main form (lets call it Form1) with some sub forms which are opened by button clicks etc.

My application generally works, but seems users in some countries of the world have issues/crashes.

Nearly all of the come out with this error:

system.formatexception

I thought it was something to do with my formats etc so as a intirim fix if users changed there's language/location/formats to English(United Kingdom) it worked, I have had reported that users don't even need to change this, all they had to do was change the Non-Unicode setting in the control panel to English(United Kingdom)

As a fix I amended all my datetime formatting (As this is pretty much the only formatting I think I do) with Culture Invariant.

This has limited success, so at the top of "Form1" before the InitializeComponent() I placed:

System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-GB");

Application.CurrentCulture = cultureInfo;

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-GB");

This actually seemed to work for almost all, my USA users were happy and had no issues.

The problem I am still having is specifically from South Korea, whether other countries are facing the same issue I don't know, but I definatly know SK are still getting the System.FormatExecption error.

So, question is, how do i force the whole (Small) program to use en-GB for all settings, and/or have I done my threading properly to make sure the thread uses the correct culture information.

3 Replies

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Vulpes13y ago
Accepted answer
If you're using VS 2012 (.NET 4.5), then you can set the culture for the application as a whole (assuming there's only one application domain) using the static CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture property:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo.defaultthreadcurrentculture.aspx

However, if you're using an earlier version, then (apart from using a dubious hack) you have to set the culture for each thread individually.

The best place to set it is at the beginning of the thread which (in the case of the main thread) would be at the beginning of the Main method in program.cs. I doubt whether it will make any difference here but you could try moving the code from the form's constructor to the Main() method.

Also I believe that setting Application.CurrentCulture just sets the culture for the current thread anyway and so that step is superfluous but it should do no harm to leave it in.

Do you know whether you're starting any other threads, either explicitly or using a BackgroundWorker say?

Of course, it would help you to fix this if you knew what the user was doing when the exception occurred as this might enable you to pinpoint the problem. Perhaps your South Korean users could help with this.
Vulpes13y ago
"I guess I could change my PC's settings to fool it to think it's in South Korea and try to replicate."

Yeah, it's probably all you can do in the circumstances.

BTW, any particular reason why you've struck with .NET 4.0 even though you could have used 4.5?
Jay S13y ago
South Korean user's english is generally poor!!

I guess I could change my PC's settings to fool it to think it's in South Korea and try to replicate.

My application has no threading at all, no background workers.

The fact i put in:

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-GB");

Was on a whim from google and have no idea on the impact, prior to this line of code theres no reference to any threading, it's just a straight up small time application.

Currently using a mixture of VS2012 Pro and VS2012 Express (Depending what machine I am using), using .NET4.0