Hi,

Where does Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture get its intial value
from and how can I view or change that value without using .NET?

I recently had a web service that was reading the
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.LCID and using that value to
perform some look ups. On my last deploy to QA, it failed because the
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.LCID had changed from 1033
(en-US) to 9 (en). I patched over the problem by explicitly setting the
uiCulture in the web.config

  <globalization culture="en-US" uiCulture="en-US" />

This has solved my problem but I am still curious what changed in the
environment to cause this value to change. I have been trying to
determine where Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture gets its initial
value from. I think the answer is the UI Culture is selected when the
OS is installed. This web service is running on Windows 2003 so MUI is
not available.

This is the most definitive resource that I have found to date:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cp
conusingcurrentuicultureproperty.asp

Implicitly Setting the CurrentUICulture Property
If the CurrentUICulture property is not set explicitly in an
application's code, it is set by default when the application starts.
It is set by the GetUserDefaultUILanguage function on Windows 2000 and
Windows XP Multilingual User Interface (MUI) products where the end
user can set their UI language. If the user's UI language is not set,
it will be set by the system-installed language, which is the language
of the operating system's resources.

I wrote a small console application to interrogate the likely suspects
and they all returned en-US or 1033.

Thanks,

Scott

PS Here is a copy of the program that I ran

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace ConsoleThread
{
   class Program
   {
       [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
       static extern int GetUserDefaultLCID();

       [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
       static extern int GetThreadLocale();

       [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
       static extern short GetSystemDefaultLangID();

       [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
       static extern short GetUserDefaultUILanguage();

       [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
       static extern short GetSystemDefaultUILanguage();

       static void Main(string[] args)
       {
           int lcid = GetUserDefaultLCID();
           short systemLcid = GetSystemDefaultLangID();
           short defaultUIlanguage = GetUserDefaultUILanguage();
           short systemDefaultUiLanguage =
GetSystemDefaultUILanguage();
           int threadLocale = GetThreadLocale();

           Console.WriteLine(".Net
Methods\n----------------------------");
           Console.WriteLine("(installed)
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture = {0}",
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture.Name);
           Console.WriteLine("(installed)
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture.LCID = {0}",
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture.LCID);
           System.Console.WriteLine("Thread UI Culture Name = {0}",
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.Name);
           System.Console.WriteLine("Thread  UI Culture LCID = {0}",
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.LCID);
           Console.WriteLine("\nWin 32
Methods\n----------------------------");
           Console.WriteLine("GetUserDefaultLCID = {0}", lcid);
           Console.WriteLine("GetThreadLocale = {0}", threadLocale);
           Console.WriteLine("GetUserDefaultUILanguage = {0}",
defaultUIlanguage);
           Console.WriteLine("(installed) GetSystemDefaultLangID =
{0}", systemLcid);
           Console.WriteLine("(installed) systemDefaultUiLanguage =
{0}", systemDefaultUiLanguage);
           Console.Read();
       }
   }
}