Windows Service Unable to get correct System Culture

Question

From Control Panel, I set my Region and Language setting to French (France)

When I am running my application as console application,

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture returns French

But when I'm running it as windows service, it returns invariant culture or English (US)

Is there a way to fix that?

Answer 1

The service is probably running as a user that has it's own culture.

Why not set the culture when you start your service

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("fr-FR");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("fr-FR");

Also from Default Culture in a Windows Service

If your Windows Service is running under the SYSTEM account or other account without a 
profile it will use the settings defined under the 
"HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/International" registry key.  

You can change these values from "Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Advanced" 
by checking the checkbox "Apply all settings to the current user account and to the default 
user profile".

I normally use the former technique as I only need to change it for a specific service rather than for the whole OS.

Answer 2

.NET 4.5 added CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture and CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture i suggest setting it as early as possible and it should solve your issue. This will change the current threads culture and all threads that are created.