Question

Is there a way of setting or overriding the default DateTime format for an entire application. I am writing an app in C# .Net MVC 1.0 and use alot of generics and reflection. Would be much simpler if I could override the default DateTime.ToString() format to be “dd-MMM-yyyy”. I do not want this format to change when the site is run on a different machine.

Edit –
Just to clarify I mean specifically calling the ToString, not some other extension function, this is because of the reflection / generated code. Would be easier to just change the ToString output.

Answer 1

The “default format” of a datetime is:

ShortDatePattern + ' ' + LongTimePattern

at least in the current mono implementation.
This is particularly painful in case you want to display something like 2001-02-03T04:05:06Z i.e. the date and time combined as specified in ISO 8606, but not a big problem in your case:

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;

namespace test {
    public static class Program {
        public static void Main() {
            CultureInfo culture = (CultureInfo)CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Clone();
            culture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "dd-MMM-yyyy";
            culture.DateTimeFormat.LongTimePattern = "";
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture;
            Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);
        }
    }
}

This will set the default behavior of ToString on datetimes to return the format you expect.