DateTime doesn't accept format or culture when deployed to a virtual machine

Question

I am exporting a string formatted DateTime to a SQL Server record from my ASP.NET(vb.net) application. This works well on my development machine. I can use any formatting and change the culture in either the web.config or my <%@ Page %> declaration.

If I deploy the application to my production server these settings are disregarded. The date time will always be generated in this format "May 7 2014 7:31PM". No culture setting and no toString format shows any effect.

I am not so much fussed about the exact format but I need to get the seconds in the DateTime string. This just seems impossible on the production server.

Edit:

There isn't much code to show. The following line is working fine on the development machine:

DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss.fff")

The point is that no format is ever applied on the production server.

Changing the culture doesn't have an effect neither (on the production server).

Edit:

In the page declaration I use:

<%@ Page Language="vb" Culture="es-MX" UICulture="es" ...

In the config I use:

<system.web>
<globalization culture="es-MX" uiCulture="es"/>

Answer 1

Rather than relying on configuration, consider changing your code to pass a specific culture.

For example:

yourDateTime.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

Or

yourDateTime.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss.fff", New CultureInfo("en-GB"))

UPDATE

Based on your comments below, I can offer the following advice:

• Culture isn't relevant for this scenario. SQL Server doesn't store dates as strings, it stores them in types like datetime or datetime2 or datetimeoffset. These types have no culture-specific attributes.

• You should never pass dates as strings when using SQL parameters. Pass them as DateTime or DateTimeOffset types.

• You probably don't need to pass it at all, as you can just use GETDATE() or GETUTCDATE() in SQL.

• I think what you mean is that when you look at the value in another tool like SQL Server Management Studio that you're seeing the output in a string with a particular format. That format has nothing to do with what is actually stored, only with how it is displayed. SQL has it's own settings for controlling that.