Wrong time separator for a C# DateTime on Microsoft Azure

I believe it's to do with the version of the CLR being used. On the CLR prior to v4, the culture information being used did have the time separator as .. On CLR v4+, it's :. I don't know why... presumably CLR v4+ is reading the regional information from a different (newer?) location. (I suspect it's down to the CLR version being used, basically.)

Anyway, I suspect if you can force your Azure service to use .NET 4, it will be okay. I suspect you'll find it's using .NET 3.5 at the moment.

As an example, take this code:

using System;
using System.Globalization;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("it-IT");
        Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString(culture));
        Console.WriteLine("Runtime: {0}", Environment.Version);
    }
}

Compile it with the C# 2 compiler:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc Test.cs

And create a Test.exe.config file:

<configuration>
   <startup>
      <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727"/>
      <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/>
   </startup>
</configuration>

Comment out one of those supportedRuntime elements at a time to see the difference.