In my locale the decimal separator is a \',\'.
However I would still like to write a C# application which works with numbers that use the \'.\' as decimal separator.
You need to specify the culture as the second argument to double.Parse, e.g.
double da = double.Parse(a, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Pretty much all of the formatting/parsing methods have overloads taking an IFormatProvider, and the most commonly-specified implementation of IFormatProvider
is CultureInfo.