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.

Using invariant culture guarantees:

DateTime formatting and parsing behaves identically everywhere
Number formatting and parsing produces consistent results (e.g., decimal separator is always .)
String comparisons and sorting are culture-independent
Serialization and deserialization never depends on machine locale

Configuration

Call UseInvariantCulture() on the IHostBuilder before building the application:

using Cratis.Arc;

var builder = ArcApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.UseInvariantCulture();
builder.AddCratisArc();

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

await app.RunAsync();

What Gets Configured

Calling UseInvariantCulture() on the builder:

Sets CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture to CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
Sets 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