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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T14:48:45+00:00

I’m doing some globalization work in my current project and I came across a

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I’m doing some globalization work in my current project and I came across a curious behavior. I’m running on Windows 7 with only English-US installed, and my app is running on .NET 3.5.

Given the following snippet:

var culture = new CultureInfo("zh-CN", true);
var formats = culture.GetAllDateTimePatterns('D');

Under .NET 4, the following formats are returned:

    yyyy'年'M'月'd'日'
    yyyy'年'M'月'd'日',dddd 
    dddd,yyyy'年'M'月'd'日'

Which is what the Date and time formats dialog in the Control Panel shows (what I was aiming for).

But on .NET 3.5 (and earlier) the following is returned:

   yyyy'年'M'月'd'日'
   yyyy-MM-dd
   dddd, yyyy-MM-dd
   dddd, yyyy'年'M'月'd'日'

I went and checked what values were returned using EnumDateFormatsExEx (and earlier versions), and it matched .NET 4’s results.

The difference doesn’t bother me; my question is why are the results different? I assumed the underlying implementation was calling out to EnumDateFormatsExEx or similar, but after I fired up Ilspy I didn’t see anything of that sort. I wanted to show the same list that appears in the Control Panel, so I was surprised when the formats came out different. I figured the format list would come from the OS, and not differ between run-time versions.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The relevant changes in .NET 4 are documented here. Highlighting:

    One of the main globalization features of the .NET Framework 4 is the ability to provide the most recent information where available. The oldest globalization information that this release will provide is the data available at shipping time, and only when running on Windows prior to Windows 7. When running on Windows 7 and later releases, the globalization information will be retrieved directly from the operating system, which means that customers will get the current globalization information when upgrading to new Windows. Customers running Windows 7 and later versions will see a unified globalization experience for both native (Win32) and managed (.NET) applications.

    Because of the ever-changing world, globalization information is subject to change at any time; developers should not expect the values of globalization properties to persist between releases, or even for the same release of the .NET Framework. This is not entirely new behavior for the .NET Framework users. The properties of the Windows-Only-Cultures which were supported since .NET Framework 2 could have different values when running on different versions of Windows

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