ASP.NET Globalization: Culture=”auto” page directive with neutral culture crash

asp.netcultureinfoglobalization

I'm running into a case where an ASP.NET application using the built-in globalization facilities is crashing.

On an ASP.NET page with the Culture="auto" directive, a user with a neutral culture as their browser language (such as "zh-Hans") will produce the following exception:

Culture 'zh-Hans' is a neutral culture. It cannot be used in
formatting and parsing and therefore
cannot be set as the thread's current
culture.

at System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CheckNeutral(CultureInfo
culture)
at System.Threading.Thread.set_CurrentCulture(CultureInfo
value)
at System.Web.UI.Page.set_Culture(String
value)
at ASP.somePage_aspx.__BuildControlTree(somePage_aspx __ctrl)
at ASP.somePage_aspx.FrameworkInitialize()

Any ideas? Garbage fed into the Culture/UICulture parameters generally seem to be ignored, but this case is causing an unhandled exception.

Best Answer

I was having the same problem and after bonking my head against a wall for a while found the answer right under my nose.

The issue I had was in not understanding the difference between CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture. The difference being CurrentCulture is used to format dates, numbers and perform sorting, CurrentUICulture is used to lookup culture specific strings from a resource.

I had some code that looked like

return input.ToString("C", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture);

when it should be been

return input.ToString("C", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

When you start trying to format culture specific items with a non-specific culture you will get the System.NotSupportedException.

Related Solutions

How to configure invariant culture in ASP.NET globalization

Either add the following to your web.config file:

<system.web>
    <globalization culture="en-US" uiCulture="en-US" />
</system.web>

or you can add this statement on the page:

<%@ Page uiCulture="en-US" culture="en-US" %>

Hope this helps.

.net – Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture

I just hit this same exception in a WPF project. The issue occurred within an assembly that we recently moved to another namespace (ProblemAssembly.Support to ProblemAssembly.Controls). The exception was happening when trying to access resources from a second resource file that exists in the assembly.

Turns out the additional resource file did not properly move references from the old namespace name to the new namespace name.

In the designer.cs for the resource file, there is a static property to get the ResourceManager. Within that getter, the string was still referring the old namespace. Once correcting it to the new namespace, the problem was resolved:

global::System.Resources.ResourceManager temp = 
     new global::System.Resources.ResourceManager(
          "ProblemAssembly.Support.Properties.Stuff", typeof(Stuff).Assembly);

should have been:

global::System.Resources.ResourceManager temp = 
     new global::System.Resources.ResourceManager(
          "ProblemAssembly.Controls.Properties.Stuff", typeof(Stuff).Assembly);

Hope this helps the next person.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to configure invariant culture in ASP.NET globalization

.net – Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture

Related Topic