Better way to Select & Read Date in dd/mm/yy format?

In earlier vb.net 2008 I used the DateTime to read the date in dd/mm/yy format. I use to change the culture info to UK format. So that the date will be sel开发者_StackOverflow社区ected from SQL server as in dd/mm/yy format.

But I know it's not good to play with CultureInfo. Even though I used like the following manner.

Any other better Ideas for me?

Sub Form_Load()
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New CultureInfo("en-GB", False)    
End Sub

Any other better Ideas for me? Thanks for the Ideas.

Thanks & Regards.

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From DateTime to string:

string s = DateTime.Today.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy");

From string to DateTime:

DateTime d;
bool success = DateTime.TryParseExact("26/05/2011", "dd/MM/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.None, out d);

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In C# you could get the date string in desired format like,

string date = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy");

If you want to get DateTime object from string value representing DateTime in specific culture, you can do

     DateTime dt = new DateTime();
                DateTime.TryParse("16/01/2011", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-GB"),
  System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);

---

DateTime --> String

DateTime.Now.ToString( new CultureInfo("fr-FR", false) );

String --> DateTime:

The preferred method would probably be DateTime.Parse()

dateString = "16/02/2008 12:15:12";
try 
{
     dateValue = DateTime.Parse(dateString, new CultureInfo("en-GB", false));
     Console.WriteLine("'{0}' converted to {1}.", dateString, dateValue);
}   
catch (FormatException) 
{
     Console.WriteLine("Unable to convert '{0}'.", dateString);
}

This way you are not changing the Culture info of the current Context. This does assume you know what the format will be beforehand though.

---

You can format the date using the CultureInfo, without setting the culture for the whole thread, thanks to the IFormatProvider interface:

DateTime d = DateTime.Now;
CultureInfo c = new CultureInfo("en-GB", false);
string s = d.ToString(c.DateTimeFormat);

This has the added advantage that you don't have any hard-coded formats, and if the user changes the localisation settings on their machine, your application will reflect their preferences.

You can use DateTime.TryParse to parse the date...

string s = "01/01/2011";
DateTime date;
if (DateTime.TryParse(s, out date))
{
    // Parsed correctly
}
else
{
    // Invalid string!
}

And even use an IFormatProvider to help TryParse work out the format.

CultureInfo c = new CultureInfo("en-GB", false);
string s = "01/01/2011";
DateTime date;
if (DateTime.TryParse(s, c.DateTimeFormat, DateTimeStyles.None, out date))
{
    // Parsed correctly
}
else
{
    // Invalid string!
}