WinRT apps and Regional settings. The correct way to format dates and numbers based on the user's regional settings?

Question

I\'m having some problems in Windows 8 Metro apps (XAML & C#) regarding the user\'s regional settings. It seems that the apps won\'t respect user\'s regional set

Answer 1

This post still seems to be relevant even though it was asked two years ago. I just came across it as I was looking for an answer to about the same thing. I also wanted to display dates in the regional format in my WP8.1 WinRT app. The information posted here helps, but it was a bit hard to piece it together.

This is what I came up with and it seems to work for me as the answer I needed:

using Windows.Globalization;
using Windows.Globalization.DateTimeFormatting;

private string FormatDate(int year, int month, int day)
{
    GeographicRegion userRegion = new GeographicRegion();
    string regionCode = userRegion.CodeTwoLetter;
    var formatter = new DateTimeFormatter("year month day", new[] { regionCode });
    DateTime dateToFormat = new DateTime(year, month, day);
    var formattedDate = formatter.Format(dateToFormat);
    return formattedDate;
}