Question

I am using a DatePicker in my WPF form, and am having the problem that when a user enters a date in British format, ie 31/12/1980, WPF seems to want to convert it to American, so it reads 12/31/1980.

This is giving me an out of range exception on my SQL insert.

Has anyone come across this before, and if so, how did you fix it?

Answer 1

You need to make sure that the UI has the correct locale set.

I’m not sure about WPF, but I know that in Silverlight there’s a bug whereby the XAML isn’t honouring the locale of Windows. You have to include the following code into the constructor of the view:

// Get "StringFormat=c" to honour culture settings.
// From http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/08/11/stringformat-and-currentculture-in-silverlight.aspx
this.Language = XmlLanguage.GetLanguage(Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Name);

Now if your computer isn’t set to en-GB but your application requires this you’ll need to force the language either by setting the CurrentCulture of the application thread or passing in “en-GB”.