Question

I have just migrated around 100 ASP.net sites from IIS 6 on Windows Sever 2003 to IIS 7 on Windows 2008. I’ve just noticed that various pieces of code that use things like DateTime.Parse have started kicking up errors “String was not recognized as a valid DateTime”. I’ve tracked this down to the fact that the CurrentCulture of the sites is defaulting to ‘en-US’ and so my UK users are inputting dates in an unexpected format.

Question is, where are they getting en-US from? Starting from the top, if I look in ‘Control Panel > Region and Language’ everything is set to English (United Kingdom). The web.configs of the sites either don’t have a <globalization> section or have it set as <globalization culture=”auto” uiCulture=”auto” />. In ‘IIS7 – .Net Globalization’ all of the sites have their culture set to ‘Invariant Language (Invariant Country)’.

I can’t find anywhere that’s settings the culture to ‘en-US’… but something is.

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Name is outputting 'en-US'
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.NumberFormat.CurrencySymbol is outputting '$'

I can fix the issue by adding <globalization culture=”en-GB” uiCulture=”en-GB” /> to every web.config BUT I really don’t want to have to hand edit about 100 web.configs! I wan’t it to inherit the culture from the server OS settings, which are set to en-GB.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

These are alternative places where you could search:

I can’t find anywhere that’s settings the culture to ‘en-US’… but something is.

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Name is outputting ‘en-US’
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.NumberFormat.CurrencySymbol is outputting ‘$’

Try looking for the InitializeCulture method, this method is overridden in ASP.Net pages to set the Culture like:

protected override void InitializeCulture()
{
    var hidden = this.Request.Form["hidden"];
    var culture = this.Request.Form[hidden];
    if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(culture))
    {
        this.Culture = culture;
        this.UICulture = culture;
    }

    base.InitializeCulture();
}

Try to look for the following assembly attributes:

    [assembly: AssemblyCulture("en-US")]
    [assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en-US", UltimateResourceFallbackLocation.MainAssembly)]

Try to look for the following page directive attributes:

    <%@ Page Culture="en-US" UICulture="en-US" Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default2.aspx.cs" Inherits="Default2" %>

Try to look in web.configs:

<globalization uiCulture="en-US" culture="en-US" enableClientBasedCulture="false" />

Edit 1

Try to look for HttpHandlers or HttpModules trying to set the language

Try to look in the web.config hierarchy (at the server, <wwwroot> means the root folder of your IIS Web Site)

1. Global machine. <windir>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<ver>\Config\Machine.config
2. Root Web config. <windir>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<ver>\Config\Web.config
3. Website. <wwwroot>\Web.config
4. Web application. <wwwroot>\<webapp>\Web.config
5. Folder. <wwwroot>\<webapp>\<dir>\Web.config

If you have multiple servers (web farm), check you are being redirected to the correct server (the one you are checking the configuration), in order to do it you can use the ip of the desired server or configure your host files in your client computer