Working With Multiple Locales In The Same Application In C# & .NET

As outlined in some earlier posts, you can set the locale of the current thread to whichever one you want.

We can leverage this if we need to process data from multiple locales in the same application.

Let us take a trivial example where we want to process some code in 3 different locales:

1. Kenyan English (en-ke)
2. French Canadian (fr-CA)
3. USA (en-US)

The strategy here is to create 3 different threads and customize them before processing.

Our code would look something like this:

// Use Serilog console sink with a thread enricher to display the Thread ID	
Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
  // Enrich
  .Enrich.WithThreadId()
  // Customize output template
  .WriteTo.Console(outputTemplate:
  "[{Timestamp:HH:mm:ss} {Level:u3}] [Thread {ThreadId}] {Message:lj}{NewLine}{Exception}")
  .CreateLogger();

var now = DateTime.Now;

// Create our tasks
var kenyan = Task.Run(() =>
{
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-KE");
  Log.Information("{Country} {Date}", "Kenya", now.ToShortDateString());
  // Custom processing here
});

var canada = Task.Run(() =>
{
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("fr-CA");
  Log.Information("{Country} {Date}", "Canada", now.ToShortDateString());
  // Custom processing here
});

var america = Task.Run(() =>
{
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
  Log.Information("{Country} {Date}", "America", now.ToShortDateString());
  // Custom processing here
});

// Await all our threads
await Task.WhenAll(kenyan, canada, america);

If we run this code, it will print something like this:

Here, we can see that each print output ran in a different thread, within which we set our custom locale.

In this way, we can write an application that accepts and processes data from users with different locales.

TLDR

Leverage the fact that localization can he set at the thread level to allow building of robust, culturally aware applications.

The code is in my GitHub.

Happy hacking!