Invariant Culture

Arc.Core provides a .UseInvariantCulture() extension method on IHostBuilder that configures the application to use invariant culture throughout, ensuring consistent and predictable behavior regardless of the host machine’s regional settings.

Why Invariant Culture?

Applications running in distributed environments—different machines, containers, or cloud regions—may be configured with different regional settings. Without explicit culture configuration, operations like number parsing, date formatting, or string comparisons may produce inconsistent results depending on where the code runs.

Invariant culture supplies a predictable default for code that uses the current culture; explicit per-call or per-thread culture choices can still override it:

• DateTime formatting and parsing uses invariant conventions by default; it does not choose a time zone
• Number formatting and parsing produces consistent results (e.g., decimal separator is always .)
• String comparisons and sorting are culture-independent
• Serialization and deserialization still follows each serializer’s contract and explicit options

Configuration

For an ArcApplication-based host (a worker or console service), set the default thread cultures to invariant before building the application:

using System.Globalization;
using Cratis.Arc;

CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;

var builder = ArcApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
builder.AddCratisArc();

var app = builder.Build();
app.UseCratisArc();

await app.RunAsync();

For a generic host, the UseInvariantCulture() extension on IHostBuilder does the same thing in one call:

using Cratis.Arc;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;

var host = Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
    .UseInvariantCulture()
    .Build();

What Gets Configured

Both approaches set:

• CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture to CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
• CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture to CultureInfo.InvariantCulture

This ensures that all threads in the application, including background threads and thread pool threads, use invariant culture by default.

When to Use

Invariant culture is recommended for:

• Background services and workers that process data without a web request context
• Applications deployed in multiple regions or cloud environments
• Data processing pipelines where consistency is critical
• Any scenario where culture-sensitive behavior could lead to bugs or data inconsistencies

It is generally safe to apply invariant culture in back-end services, as locale-specific formatting should be handled on the client side rather than in the service itself.

ASP.NET Core Applications

If you are building an ASP.NET Core application, use the WebApplicationBuilder extension instead, which additionally configures the ASP.NET Core request localization middleware. See Invariant Culture for ASP.NET Core for details.