Recently I added some seemingly innocent code to Subtext within the Application_BeginRequest method of Global.asax.cs that I adapted from this blog post by Darren Neimke. The purpose of the code is to provide culture aware formatting of dates, times, and numbers specific to the user reading the blog.

// Set the user culture.  Got the idea from
// http://markitup.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=52252561-f83d-4463-82f0-769fce82fd82
// but modified it to catch specific exceptions.
//TODO: Make sure we store dates in UTC etc and do the conversion when we pull them.
//      I assume we do this but haven't checked.
try
{
   if (Request.UserLanguages != null
         && Request.UserLanguages.Length \> 0
         && Request.UserLanguages[0] != null)
   {
      Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture =
CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Request.UserLanguages[0]);
   }
}
catch(NotSupportedException nse)
{
   log.Error("Error while attempting to set CurrentCulture to '" +
Request.UserLanguages[0] + "'", nse);
}

Such a simple snippet of code, yet it introduced a couple of bugs, both which can be seen in this screen capture that Jayson Knight kindly sent me.

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The first error, the fact that you see the same month over and over, has been fixed in our codebase, but I have yet to deploy it to my blog. That has to do with how different cultures format dates differently when ordering the month and the day.

The second error is the fact that Jayson is seeing the months in what appears to be Portugese in the first place. At one time, he saw the months in Spanish. I started wondering if somehow a thread from the thread pool with a CurrentCulture already set was servicing his request, but that didn’t make any sense since it should be reset for him.

Then it occurred to me today. Subtext makes extensive use of caching on multiple levels from data caching to output caching. When I added this code, I didn’t go through and update all code that caches data to vary the cache by user language. Doh!

Once again, the law of unintended consequences smacks me upside the forehead.

UPDATE: Jon Galloway points out that Scott Hanselman wrote about this very thing recently. I read that post and totally forgot about it when I made my change. Blogs are good, umm’kay.