Non-English operating systems, InvariantCulture, and You

As previously mentioned, Magecrawl's 2nd tech demo was released yesterday. I received multiple reports of crashes during map generation. After some detective work, it became clear that all of the reporters were using non-English versions of Windows (Polish and French). This issue can be boiled down to this simple string:

"10.0"

In some languages, the period there is replaced with a comma. All of the .NET languages by default, defaults to using the system language. This creates problems when text written using one separator is read by a program using another. The text is read fine, but when you try to parse it to a number, an exception is thrown.

The solution easy (arguably hacky) solution that somebody showed me is to tell .NET to "stop doing that".

            CultureInfo previousCulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
            //Your code here that depends on reading/writing text between languages.
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = previousCulture;

What we're doing here is saving off the current thread's "culture" and setting it to InvariantCulture. Then we can do our operation, and reset it back when we're done. In my case, I wrap the functions save/load functions and those that read spell/item/monster information.

If you've been bitten by this issue in Magecrawl, grab the new release here. If you use an English OS, there isn't a behavior change.