I recently came across a good Code Project article:
Globalization Patterns in WCF (WS-I18N implementation)
written by Pablo M. Cibraro.
Basically, there exists a standard specs (WS-I18N) describing how to pass international information (e.g. locale & time zone) to a SOAP endpoint in order for that web service to return you localized data.
An interesting aspect of that spec is that it passes the international information out-of-band in the soap header. It therefore doesn’t contaminate your web service signature and if you skip that header, you gracefully get data in the default locale & time zone.
Now Pablo shows how to implement this pattern (or specs) in WCF.
He first shows the server-side, the hard way, using a message-contract where he defines the entire message format of a web-method, including the international header.
He then goes on and shows how you would set the header on the client-side, using message inspectors.
He finally shows a nicer server-side implementation where you do not use message contract (which are frankly annoying to use) but instead use inspectors to gather information from the header. This hints toward a great system-strategy where you could set the culture of the request thread to the header-culture.
It’s all great stuff!
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