Question

I have been searching for something which might help me to resolve our current issues with cultures in an MVVM Prism setup using WPF and Silverlight.

Our setup requires us to have a central server which is setup using en-gb culture and database language of us-english, this is used by the Silverlight system with no issues as we handle the differences in cultures by passing the users CultureInformation with the service call allowing us to process an values within the XML by using double.parse(value, userCulture), this also allows us the pass the values back. We also support an offline version of the software with its own local database which shares a subset of data with the online version, this is updated using the softwares internal update functionality.

If I retrieve XML data back from my database it is in the following example format

<code>
<Pipe>
 <RowNumber>1</RowNumber>
 <Standard>Schedule</Standard>
 <Size>125</Size>
 <DN>DN125</DN>
 <TransDN>DN125</TransDN>
 <Inches>5"</Inches>
 <Designation>40</Designation>
 <IntDia>128.20</IntDia>
 <OutDia>141.30</OutDia>
 <Wall>6.5500</Wall>
 <Area>1.290820730000000e002</Area>
</Pipe>
</code>

This then causes an issue in the following two scenarios:
If the user is running the software locally they will access the dlls directly and may potentially try and parse the above numerical values using the machines local culture settings. In the case of Spain for example this will reverse the use of the , and . values in numerical fields. This results in the IntDia value coming back as 12820,00.

I can specify the details each time I want to retrieve XML data, however I was wondering if there was a cleaner way for us to handle this scenario so we might return the xml data in the correct culture.

Answer 1

In case anyone has this problem in the future I had to find an alternative approach.

I instead opted to run the service under a separate thread where I could specify the Threads culture to be CultureInvariant

        var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
        {
            Thread.CurrentThread.Name = "GetDetailsAsync";
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;

            var uD = details.GetDetails(userName, password, cultureDetails);
            this.dispatcher.BeginInvoke((Action)
                (() => completedAction.Invoke(this, new GetDetailsCompletedEventArgs(new object[] { uD }, null, false, null))));
        });

        task.ContinueWith(
            s =>
            {
                task.Dispose();
                Debug.WriteLine("GetDetailsAsync thread disposed.");
            });