How do you globally set the date format in ASP.NET?

Question

How do you globally set the date format in ASP.NET?

My local machine and servers have Regional Settings set to "English (New Zealand)".

When I format a date with "dd/MM/yyyy" I expect to see "19/11/2008" for today for example.

Until recently, that is what I did in fact get from both my local machine and the servers.

Just recently, for some mysterious reason, our local machines have changed ever so slightly. Despite still be set to "English (New Zealand)", the date delimter has changed from "/" to "-"! The same change has not occurred on the servers which still show "English (New Zealand)" and the "/" for the date delimter.

So now for my local machine, for the format "dd/MM/yyyy" I get "19-11-2008" instead of "19/11/2008".

This is a little disconcerting.

The only way around it that I can see so far is to escape the slashes and set the format to "dd\/MM\/yyyy". It seems to work, but it doesn't seem to be the ideal solution.

Can anyone please help?

NOTE: This is for an intranet application and I do not care about true globalisation. I just want to fix the date format and not have it change on me.

Answer 1

You can change the current thread culture in your Global.asax file, and override the date format for example:

using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;

//...
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{    
  CultureInfo newCulture = (CultureInfo) System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Clone();
  newCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "dd-MMM-yyyy";
  newCulture.DateTimeFormat.DateSeparator = "-";
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = newCulture;
}

Answer 2

For format strings, the format character / does not actually resolve to the literal "/" as you would expect. Instead, it resolves to the current date time separator as configured in your regional settings. Try changing the DateTimeFormatInfo.DateSeparator property.

For more information, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx

Answer 3

In web.config, set tag as per the following documenation

<globalization
    culture="en-NZ"
    uiCulture="en-NZ"/>