Question

My application work with SQL Server and it works with different servers with different culture infos (for example Ru-Ru, En-US, etc.) … How can I insert data value to it? I need to convert my DateTime to string depends on server’s culture, but how?

Answer 1

For culture Specific conversion you can use:

String s = "14.12.2011";

d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("Ru-Ru")); //Russia
d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US")); //English United States

But if you really can’t decide what culture to use when converting dates to strings and vice-versa, and the dates are never meant to be shown to a user, then you can use the Invariant Culture:

String s = "14/12/2011" //invariant culture formatted date

d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); //parse invariant culture date

s = d.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); //convert to invariant culture string

And if you are converting your dates and saving them as strings you can use ISO-8601 date format i.e YYYYMMDD or YYYYMMDD HH:MM:SS, this will always work, regardless of currently selected language or culture settings in SQL Server.

The following Stackoverflow question may help you:

Reference: DateTime issue when global culture of the server is different on different servers

Hope this helps.