Question

I am writing a month calendar-style control, and need to display a string that indicates today’s date. So on an English-culture machine it would show 'Today : 11/02/2009'.

If a different culture happens to be used, such as French, then I would like to use the French word for ‘Today’.

Does the .NET platform expose this word as part of the culture information so I can retrieve it automatically? I cannot find anything exposed but maybe I am not looking in the right place.

Answer 1

Old.. but still useful (how old? VB6 old).

Basically Windows keeps a localized version of ‘Today’ in Comctl32.dll. You can fish it out with a a loadstringex call:

Private Const IDM_TODAY As Long = 4163 Private Const IDM_GOTODAY As Long = 4164  Public Function GetTodayLocalized(ByVal LocaleId As Long) As String     Static hComCtl32 As Long     Static hComCtl32Initialized As Boolean     Static hComCtl32MustBeFreed As Boolean      Dim s As String      If Not hComCtl32Initialized Then         hComCtl32 = GetModuleHandle('Comctl32.dll')         If hComCtl32 <> 0 Then             hComCtl32MustBeFreed = False             hComCtl32Initialized = True         Else             hComCtl32 = LoadLibrary('Comctl32.Dll')             If Not hComCtl32 = 0 Then                 hComCtl32MustBeFreed = True                 hComCtl32Initialized = True             End If         End If     End If      If hComCtl32Initialized = False Then         s = 'Today'     Else         s = LoadStringEx(hComCtl32, IDM_TODAY, LocaleId)         If s = '' Then             s = 'Today'         End If     End If      If hComCtl32MustBeFreed Then         FreeLibrary hComCtl32         hComCtl32MustBeFreed = False         hComCtl32Initialized = False         hComCtl32 = 0     End If      s = Replace(s, '&', '')     If Right(s, 1) = ':' Then         s = Left(s, Len(s) - 1)     End If      GetTodayLocalized = s End Function