.NET Globalization: Set Culture/UICulture on a Page or a Thread? What's the difference?

Question

Question title is basically the entire question. In ASP.NET you can set the Culture/UICulture properties of a page by overriding the InitializeCulture method, or you can set the properties of the current thread.

What are the differences? What are the advantages/disadvantages of both? What situations would you use each option?

Oxalate

There you go: support.microsoft.com/kb/306162 – Openfaced

Answer 1

Both approaches ultimately set the properties on the current thread.

The biggest difference is that the Page methods support automatic language detection - they can determine the language from the request (if you set the value to "auto", optionally with a default). By contrast, the Thread methods require a specific culture instance.

For a web application, I'd just use the Page methods, because they provide additional options and save me the (admittedly trivial) trouble of constructing a CultureInfo instance myself.

Clara

Brilliant, that makes sense. One quick followup though.. how is the language detected from the request? – Oxalate

It accesses it through HttpRequest.UserLanguages, which parses the request's HTTP headers. (I think the Accept-Language header, maybe Content-Language.) – Clara