Honoring your user’s culture settings with Silverlight

One thing that I’m just as guilty as probably most of some of my peers is creating US-centric applications.  Forgetting to think globally for your users is something that I think happens too often.  We operate in our US-centric worlds and forget that sometimes even the simplest things can make a difference.

Take for instance, honoring your user’s culture settings (region/locale/whatever you want to call it).  Even if you have a US-based application for a US-company, how do you know that a user might not be of French origin and still perhaps like to view their operating system information in French settings, so they change their culture.

Luckily in some areas this is simple to do, and for Silverlight applications you can let the platform do some of the work for you.  I’ll take a simple example of currency settings.  A colleague of mine was asking about currency formatting in his Silverlight application with regard to data binding.  He sent me a note asking why his formatter didn’t work.  He asked me why:

   1: ConverterParameter={0:$##.00}

As it turns out, it was just something missing in his implementing of a custom converter in his application.  But I let him know that he should really use {0:c} and let the platform do the work.  Let’s look at a simple example of an employee and their salary.  If we data bind this information to a DataGrid using the above formatter here is what we might get:

Makes sense right, looks fine.  Now let’s change the regional settings on my machine to French (France):

Hmm…what happened here.  Well the problem is we forced the format.  Let’s change the format parameter to {0:c} and keep French as our settings and see:

Ah, now that makes sense.  You see we can let our platform do the work and Silverlight is aware of how to use culture settings to honor currency, dates, etc. – here’s the default Calendar with French settings:

Now ideally in our sample with salaries above a literal visual translation probably isn’t accurate (by that I mean USD $1 is not the same as 1 Euro right now in translation.  We could add some custom logic though and get this output based on culture settings:

So be mindful of your applications and look for ways you can reliably and meaningfully add value to your global end users.  Don’t force a format unless you absolutely have to.