Visual Studio sorting JSON properties wrong

Question

I've run into a weird problem with Visual Studio 2017 (Enterprise, version 15.5.2) that I can only replicate on one specific machine. The problem doesn't occur on other development machines.

Given a file foo.resources.json with the following contents:

{
    "FooReparatur": "Reparatur",
    "FooVerlust": "Verlust",
    "FooWema": "Wema"
}

Applying the quick action Sort Properties results in the keys being in the wrong order:

{
    "FooReparatur": "Reparatur",
    "FooWema": "Wema",
    "FooVerlust": "Verlust"
}

The configured language for Visual Studio is English, there is no schema selected for the given file. The configured language for Windows is Estonian, but the sorting order is wrong by that alphabet as well.

I checked for any funny unicode characters or anything similar via a hexdump, but found nothing of the like either. As mentioned before, the file sorts correctly on all other machines.

I've tried disabling all the (default) extensions the installation has, but that doesn't resolve the problem either.

I've looked through most of the settings for both general text editing and the specific file type, but I can't find a setting that could cause this. What could be the issue? How can I debug this further?

Answer 1

This is a property of Estonian collation where 'V' and 'W' are treated as the same character. Hence, the next character that differs will be the significant one. As can be demonstrated by this C# code using .Net.

var words1 =  new[] { "FooR", "FooVer", "FooWem" };
var words2 = new[] { "FooR", "FooVa", "FooWb" };

var estonianCultureInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("et-EE");
var estonianComparer = StringComparer.Create(estonianCultureInfo, false);

var sortedWords = words1.OrderBy(x => x, estonianComparer);
foreach (var word in sortedWords)
{
    Console.WriteLine(word);
}

Console.WriteLine("[-----]");

sortedWords = words2.OrderBy(x => x, estonianComparer);
foreach (var word in sortedWords)
{
    Console.WriteLine(word);
}

Output:

FooR
FooWem
FooVer
[-----]
FooR
FooVa
FooWb