DateTime.Now Date Format and Windows Settings

Question

I have a console application written in C# that makes use of DateTime.Now. With the Windows Region set to "English (United States)", the short date output is M/d/yyyy. I have an instance of my application running on a machine with the culture format set to "English (Canada)" and the short date format set to dd/MM/yyyy. Since I want consistency within my application across different servers, I changed the short date format in Windows' Region settings to M/d/yyyy. However, my application is still outputting DateTime.Now as dd/MM/yyyy. Is there something else that needs to be changed for my application to output in the format I specified?

I do this in various places but here is an example:

TimeZoneInfo customTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
DateTime thisTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(DateTime.Now, customTimeZone);
//The below output is not formatted how the Windows Region short date is specified.
Console.Writeline(thisTime);

In this case, my DateTime is not formatted how its specified in the Windows Region settings.

Answer 1

If you can handle the date being as a string, I don't recommand you use the settings to get past this problem. You should use something like this :

DateTime.Now.ToString("MM\/dd\/yyyy")

This way you have full control over the output independently of region settings.

Answer 2

You can change the culture of the current thread as follows on application start. This affects the date format, currency format, etc.

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");

See MSDN: Globalization for more information (see section on Dates and Times).

Answer 3

First, a little correction to the answer by @phadaphunk: the line

DateTime.Now.ToString("MM\/dd\/yyyy");

will cause an error: 'unrecognized escape sequence'. So, it can be corrected as

DateTime.Now.ToString(@"MM\/dd\/yyyy");

The more general way to specify the DateTime format as detailed in MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4%28v=vs.110%29.aspx would be the following:

String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}",DateTime.Now);

with CultureInfo.InvariantCulture explicitly specified as suggested by @Joe, or thread-specific CurrentCulture set to CultureInfo("en-US") as suggested by @async.

Hope this will help. Best regards,