Parse a date in NET

Today I had a little bug in an application of mine, I have a routine that accepts a series of parameter through a comma separated string of values, this kind of interface to a function is not a good thing to do, expecially when DateTime variables are transmitted, but this is an old routine and worked well for a while, so I did not refactor.

The problem is arising now when the application build another function on top of this routine. Until now whenever I need to parse a DateTime from string I Symply use the current culture and all works well, but another functionality is requested, these string are to be saved in database and then reused, then here is the problem, a user with default English language insert a string in MM/dd/yyyy format, then save into the database a list of parameter like this “1/30/2007,3/20/2007”, later an Italian user retrieve the string, passed to the routine that split the string, and try to convert date with the Italian culture…ooooppssssssssss. L

After a couple of minutes of investigation I remembered an article that I read a lot of time ago…in.NET 2.0 DateTime type has not only the Parse() method, but also the ParseExact(), that has an overload version that accepts an array of string listing all supported formats….this is exactly what you need whenever a Multilanguage software should convert DAteTime values from/to string.

Private
Shared
ReadOnly ValidDateTimeFormats() As
String = {“dd/MM/yyyy”, “MM/dd/yyyy”}
…
DateTime.ParseExact(value, ValidDateTimeFormats, Nothing, Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None)

Alk.