How To detect that a culture is bidi

Andy Canfield asked:

I read your post here:

How To [NOT] detect that a locale is bidi

and I have recently come up against this issue but have a slightly different problem. I know how to do what you showed in C but I need to translate it to C# for .Net 1.1 because the .Net environment I have to work in will not allow me to upgrade to .Net 2.0 where textinfo has a property that tells you wether or not it is bidi. So my question is ( since I do not know C# well at all ), is will you take a look at my code for a bidi aware MessageBox and tell me if I translated the C to C# correctly? If you will my code is below. If not then thank you for your time.

Andy

I did not include Andy's code (since it was really wrong; sorry Andy!). But here is a quick example of the code converted to C#:

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace Sig {
    class test {
        private unsafe struct LOCALESIGNATURE {
            public fixed uint lsUsb[4];
            public fixed uint lsCsbDefault[2];
            public fixed uint lsCsbSupported[2];
        }; 

        private const uint LOCALE_FONTSIGNATURE = 0x00000058;   // font signature

        [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet=CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling=true, CallingConvention=CallingConvention.StdCall, SetLastError=true)]
        private static extern int GetLocaleInfoW(int Locale, uint LCType, out LOCALESIGNATURE lpLCData, int cchData);

        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args) {
            if(args.Length > 0) {
                Console.WriteLine(IsBiDirectional(new CultureInfo(args[0])));
            } else {
                Console.WriteLine("You must pass a culture name.");
            }
        }

        internal unsafe static bool IsBiDirectional(CultureInfo ci) {
            LOCALESIGNATURE ls;

            if(GetLocaleInfoW(ci.LCID, LOCALE_FONTSIGNATURE, out ls, 16) > 0 &&
              ((ls.lsUsb[3] & 0x8000000) != 0)) {
                return(true);
            } else {
                return(false);
            }
        }
    }
}

One of the advantages that both C# and C++ have over C is that you can define multiple overloads for a function if there are different ways to call it. So a new, safe overload for GetLocaleInfo that returns LOCALESIGNATURE structs is just what we need. :-)

When you compile it, make sure you use the /unsafe flag to csc.exe.... then just call your binary with the name of a culture (like ar-SA, he-IL, fr-FR, or whatever) and it will return the answer to the bidirectional question....

From there you can do whatever you like to flip the MessageBox as needed.

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