FXCop and string culture

Rules are great, unless blindly followed.

I thought I would just send this out as a reminder. While everyone is eager to do right by FxCop we should not forget to use the Invariant Culture where appropriate.

FxCop will complain about any string formatting without an explicit culture. If you are formatting for internal use and not for display you really should consider using CultureInfo.InvariantCulture. This is particularly important if you plan to consume the string with software. Using the current culture would mean the string potentially could not be consumed by another server/PC. For example, if you used BCMax in Dubai it would have a different culture to the StrataMax server running here.

So if it is an internal string not for display or to be interpreted by software anywhere consider doing this:

receiptNumber.ToString("#", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Instead of this:

receiptNumber.ToString(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);