The namespace contains classes that define culture-related information, including language, country/region, calendars in use, format patterns for dates, currency, and numbers, and sort order for strings. These classes are useful for writing globalized (internationalized) applications. Classes such as and provide advanced globalization functionalities, including surrogate support and text element processing. The following MSDN blogs include discussions of the namespace and its classes: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste/ http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/ http://blogs.msdn.com/kierans/