When a System.Globalization.CultureInfo or IFormatProvider object is not supplied, the default value that is supplied by the overloaded member might not have the effect that you want in all locales.

You should supply culture-specific information according to the following guidelines:

• If the value will be displayed to the user, use the current culture. See CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.
• If the value will be stored and accessed by software (persisted to a file or database), use the invariant culture. See CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.
• If you do not know the destination of the value, have the data consumer or provider specify the culture.

This rule raises an issue when a method or constructor calls one or more members that have overloads that accept a System.IFormatProvider parameter, and the method or constructor does not call the overload that takes the IFormatProvider parameter. This rule ignores calls to .NET Framework methods that are documented as ignoring the IFormatProvider parameter as well as the following methods:

• Activator.CreateInstance
• ResourceManager.GetObject
• ResourceManager.GetString

Noncompliant Code Example

using System;

namespace MyLibrary
{
    public class Foo
    {
        public void Bar(String string1)
        {
            if(string.Compare(string1, string2, false) == 0) // Noncompliant
            {
                Console.WriteLine(string3.ToLower()); // Noncompliant
            }
        }
    }
}

Compliant Solution

using System;
using System.Globalization;

namespace MyLibrary
{
    public class Foo
    {
        public void Bar(String string1, String string2, String string3)
        {
            if(string.Compare(string1, string2, false,
                              CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) == 0)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(string3.ToLower(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture));
            }
        }
    }
}

Exceptions

This rule will not raise an issue when the overload is marked as obsolete.