Where is the system locale/culture set for .Net

Question

I have a problem with a c# assembly (.net 2.0 written using Visual studio 2005) that is installed on a UK server and should use UK regional settings.

What my code do

Answer 1

I believe this is represented by System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture, so if nothing else maybe you can copy that to the thread's current culture. I'm surprised that you found a case where the threads culture is different than the installed culture. Perhaps your code is running in a process that changed the culture?

It is possible the account running the code has different regional settings than the system default. Have you checked that?

Answer 2

You do not have to change the CurrentCulture to do the transformation. If you are certain that the date is in the form of "dd/MM/yyyy" you could use

DateTime dtTemp = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString, "dd/MM/yyyy", null) // in order not to have to specify a FormatProvider

and then use

dtTemp.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

This way you will not have a problem no matter what the CurrentCulture is. However, if you are not certain that the Date is of the form "dd/MM/yyyy" rather it is based on the CurrentCulture short date format, then you should use

DateTime dtTemp = DateTime(dateString, CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern, CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat);

Answer 3

thanks for your answers (andy posted the question on my behalf). It was indeed an issue with regional settings but neither with the user I was connected under, nor with the user the process was running under. That would have been too easy. It looks like that the default user was still en-US. I did reset by clicking the checkbox "Apply settings to the current user and default user..." in the advanced tab and rebooting the server. System.Globalization.CultureInfo now return {en-GB}. And a MyDate.ToString(yyyy-mm-dd) works fine whether the date is passed as dd/MM/yyyy or dd-MM-yyyy or yyyy-MM-dd without the need to parse.

However thanks you all very much for your suggestions (ParseExact, etc) that did indeed work. They ill be very helpful for other date formats that I was not able to handle in a nice way (yyyyMMdd).

Marc

Answer 4

To set the UI culture and culture for all pages, add a globalization section to the Web.config file, and then set the uiculture and culture attributes, as shown in the following example:

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

Answer 5

The server is not configured correctly. Control Panel + Region and Language, Location tab. Changing this could be a bit tricky. The server may well have been mis-configured on purpose. Talk to the server administrator first before doing anything.

Your fallback plan is to use the DateTime.TryParse() method overload that takes the IFormatProvider argument. Pass CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-gb").DateTimeFormat.

Answer 6

Hmmm, according to the API Docs:

When a thread is started, its culture is initially determined by using GetUserDefaultLCID from the Windows API.

This method derives it's locale from the (as the name implies) User's Default Locale, which I assume is in the Control Panel. NOTE: This is NOT the same as the UI Locale.