How to fix an application that has a problem with decimal separator

Question

This post is about C# and .Net, but some info is valuable for other techonolgies.

Since I can remember, I\'ve been having problems with apps or games that c

Answer 1

I feel your pain, the port of RunKeeper to Windows Phone 7 got this wrong, and reported me breaking the speed of light, by a factor of 100 000 last month.

If you are being sloppy you'll run into these problems but for the most part they can be avoided. Strictly speaking you should always present information in it's localized format and then convert it to a culture agnostic or base value when you save it. This way you can always target specific cultures.

The problem I believe many .NET developers run into is that they do not understand that all the default parse methods fallback on the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture and use a specific number format for that culture and it is the same with dates and time zones.

Something that I might consider doing is to setup a chain of responsibility, one in which I had the culture specific variants queried first and a culture invariant fallback. I'd never mix these but I'd support a culture agnostic default that should work if you adhered to some typical convention (e.g. English number formats). But that might not be the right choice every time, educate you user if they think parsing a mixed numerical format CSV file is a sound thing to do.