Globalization

Globalization is the process of designing and developing an application that supports localized user interfaces and regional data for users in multiple cultures. In the .NET Framework, the CultureInfo class represents information about a specific culture. This information includes the writing system, calendars in use, date and time formatting conventions, numeric and currency conventions, and sorting rules.

Before beginning the design phase, you should determine which cultures your application will support. This allows you to design features that support all the identified cultures. In addition, you will be able to focus on writing code that functions equally well for all the supported cultures.

The System.Globalization namespace contains classes that define culture-related information, including language, country/region, calendars in use, format patterns for dates, currency, and numbers, and the sort order for strings. Use these classes to simplify the process of developing a world-ready application. By passing a CultureInfo object representing the current culture to methods in this namespace, your application can initiate the correct set of rules and data for the current user's culture.

See Also

Concepts

Encoding and Localization Overview