Culture is suddenly not supported anymore on Azure web app

Question

Out of the blue our Azure web app is spewing out errors regarding a Culture that is not supported. We load up a list of countries to show on the front page but this is suddenly giving errors. The same code is used on other various web apps as well and they aren't having the problem.

The following code gives a problem.

 private List<SelectListItem> Countries()
        {
            RegionInfo country = new RegionInfo(new CultureInfo("nl-BE", false).LCID);
            List<SelectListItem> countryNames = new List<SelectListItem>();
        foreach (CultureInfo cul in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
        {
            country = new RegionInfo(new CultureInfo(cul.Name, false).LCID);
            countryNames.Add(new SelectListItem() { Text = country.DisplayName, Value = country.DisplayName });
        }

        return countryNames.GroupBy(x => x.Text).Select(x => x.FirstOrDefault()).ToList<SelectListItem>().OrderBy(x => x.Text).ToList();
    }

I placed a try-catch in the for-each so I can pinpoint the cultures that are giving errors. The following cultures are suddenly returning errors:

<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>ar-001</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>el-CY</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>en-BB</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>en-BS</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>en-HK</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>en-NL</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>en-SE</Name>
</errors>
<errors>
<LCID>4096</LCID>
<Name>es-419</Name>
</errors>

Can someone help me with this issue? I can't seem to make sense on why this web app is suddenly giving these errors.

Answer 1

I confirm that these are new cultures that were just added in Azure App Service, and evidently it was done in a way that creating a RegionInfo fails. The simplest repro is:

var culture = new CultureInfo("en-HK", false).LCID;
var region = new RegionInfo(culture);

And that fails with:

Unhandled Exception: System.Globalization.CultureNotFoundException: Culture is not supported. Parameter name: culture 4096 (0x1000) is an invalid culture identifier. at System.Globalization.CultureData.GetCultureData(Int32 culture, Boolean bUseUserOverride) at System.Globalization.RegionInfo..ctor(Int32 culture)

We are investigating further. In the meantime, catching exceptions and ignoring cultures where that fail is the recommended workaround.

Answer 2

Almost all of the new locales in Windows are not assigned explicit LCIDs - because there is not enough "room" for the thousands of languages in hundreds of countries problem. They all get assigned 0x1000.

In this case, I think a changing LCID to name might work for you:

country = new RegionInfo(new CultureInfo(cul.Name, false).LCID);

to just use the culture name:

country = new RegionInfo(cul.Name);

Of course, any other use of LCID would also need to recognize the culture name instead.

We actually recommend that RegionInfo be constructed with a full culture name since that is more explicit than just the region name.  RegionInfo has some properties that "depend" on the languages, such as the DisplayName. es-US and en-US provide Spanish or English strings for "United States", for example.

Hope that helps,

-Shawn