.NET Culture

Like version numbers, assemblies also have a culture as part of their identity. Cultures are identified via a string that contains a primary and a secondary tag. As the samples, German's

Primary Tag-de and CH as Secondary Tag; for British English itz en GB

In general, if you create an assembly that contains code, you don’t assign a culture to it. This is because code doesn’t usually have any culture-specific assumptions built into it. An assembly that isn’t assigned a culture is referred to as being culture neutral.

Now you can create one or more separate assemblies that contain only culture-specific resources—no code at all. Assemblies that are marked with a culture are called satellite assemblies. For these satellite assemblies, assign a culture that accurately reflects the culture of the resources placed in the assembly. You should create one satellite assembly for each culture you intend to support.

You’ll usually use the AL.exe tool to build a satellite assembly. You won’t use a compiler because the satellite assembly should have no code contained within it. When using AL.exe, you specify the desired culture by using the /c[ulture]:text switch, where text is a string such as “en-US,” representing U.S. English. When you deploy a satellite assembly, you should place it in a subdirectory whose name matches the culture text.

If you prefer, you can specify the culture by using the System.Reflection. AssemblyCultureAttribute custom attribute instead of using AL.exe’s /culture switch as

[assembly:AssemblyCulture("en-US")]