I am cleaning up some code in a C# app that I wrote and really trying to focus on best practices and coding style. As such, I am running my assembly through FXCop and trying to research each message it gives me to decide what should and shouldn’t be changed. What I am currently focusing on are locale settings. For instance, the two errors that I have currently are that I should be specifying the IFormatProvider parameter for Convert.ToString(int), and setting the Dataset and Datatable locale. This is something that I’ve never done, and never put much thought into. I’ve always just left that overload out.
The current app that I am working on is an internal app for a small company that will very likely never need to run in another country. As such, it is my opinion that I do not need to set these at all. On the other hand, doing so would not be such a big deal, but it seems like it is unneccessary and could hinder readability to a degree.
I understand that Microsoft’s contention is to use it if it’s there, period. Well, I’m technically supposed to call Dispose() on every object that implements IDisposable, but I don’t bother doing that with Datasets and Datatables. I wonder what the practice in regards to globalization and localization on small-scale internal apps is “in the wild.”
I usually ignore those kinds of warnings for small internal apps. Remember that FXCop is meant to make sure that your code is good for a framework, not all of them might be relevant to you, I always disable various rules that I don’t think fits with the applications as I build them.
Though I would call Disponse on any classes that implements them, doesn’t matter if they don’t do anything now, an upgraded version of the class might start leaking something essential, and it’s a good habit to get into.