Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework (Core Reference)

Summary

If there is any possibility that your application will be deployed in multiple international locations, you should take globalization and localization into account in its design. Most of the .NET Compact Framework classes provide culturally sensitive formatting functionality based on the regional settings of the operating system, but you must ensure that your application does not use custom formats or parsing logic that will fail if the regional settings are changed. You can use the CultureInfo class to retrieve information about the currently selected culture or to represent alternative cultures within your application.

You should use Unicode internally in your application for all character data. However, you should use the Encoding class ...