Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

13.2. Cultures and Regions

The ASP.NET page that is pulled up in an end user's browser runs under a specific culture and region setting. When building an ASP.NET application or page, the defined culture in which it runs is dependent upon a culture and region settings coming from the server in which the application is run or from a setting applied by the end user (the client). By default, ASP.NET runs under a culture setting defined by the server.

The world is made up of a multitude of cultures, each of which has a language and a set of defined ways in which it views and consumes numbers, uses currencies, sorts alphabetically, and so on. The .NET Framework defines cultures and regions using the Request for Comments 1766 standard definition (Tags for Identification, and Languages) that specifies a language and region using two-letter codes separated by a dash. The following table provides examples of some culture definitions.

Culture Code	Description
en-US	English language; United States
en-GB	English language; United Kingdom (Great Britain)
en-AU	English language; Australia
en-CA	English language; Canada

This table defines four distinct cultures that have some similarities and some differences. All four cultures speak the same language (English). For this reason, the language code of en is used in each culture setting. After the language setting comes the region setting. Even though these cultures speak the same language, it is important to distinguish them further by setting their region ...