Needs Improvement

I'm sure this violates a principle...

In ASP.NET 1.1, the Page class' Culture and UICulture properties are write-only. I've often wondered why this is, since the set accessors just set the current thread's CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture properties, and the get accessors could just get their culture names:

protected string Culture
{
    set
    {
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = HttpServerUtility.CreateReadOnlyCultureInfo(value);
    }
    // I'd have added:
    // get
    // {
    //     return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Name;
    // }
}

protected string UICulture
{
    set
    {
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = HttpServerUtility.CreateReadOnlyCultureInfo(value);
    }
    // I'd have added:
    // get
    // {
    //     return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.Name;
    // }
}

In ASP.NET 2.0 beta 2, you can set and get Culture and UICulture, but the get accessors return the current thread's cultures' display names:

protected string Culture
{
    set
    {
        // This is more complicated because of the "auto" culture.
    }
    get
    {
        return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.DisplayName;
    }
}

protected string UICulture
{
    set
    {
        // This is more complicated because of the "auto" culture.
    }
    get
    {
        return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.DisplayName;
    }
}

Why is this worth mentioning?

First, you can't create an instance of CultureInfo given a display name, so you can't round-trip Culture and UICulture values like this:

    string oldCulture = Culture;
    Culture = "ja-JP";
    // ...
    Culture = oldCulture;

Even this won't work:

    Culture = Culture;

Second, display names are in the language of the localized version of the .NET Framework, not in the language of the current culture. Unless your application is monolingual and you're using a version of the .NET Framework localized for that language, you won't want to show your users display names.

So what gives? Shouldn't property values round-trip unless there's a good reason not to? Can anyone tell me what the reason would be in this case?

Colin

02:46 PM | Colin