Date format localization causes the Issue on ArcGIS Rest API

Our project is using Silverlight 5 and ArcGIS Rest API. We are very happy that the product is live in 7 countries now.

Recently our users in some EMEA countries reported the issue saying that they can’t use some important features in their local machines.  This makes me think that it is the localization issue.  Developers always use English Operating system and IE (en-US) to develop the important features. Of course, there is no issue in their local machines. Testers can’t find those localization issues, either. We need to narrow down the issue and see if we can still repro them. 

It makes me think of some scenarios:

IE French (fr-FR): causes the issue when testing

IE Germany (de-DE):  no issue when testing

Change system Locale to French or Germany and use IE (en-US): No issue when testing.

Change date format to French and use IE (en-US): causes the issue when testing.

Change date format to German and use IE (en-US):  causes the issue when testing.

Change date format to Chinese (PRC) and use IE (en-US): causes the issue when testing in another feature.

Since our product is live in 7 countries, we need to narrow down the issue and finally we find date format in localization causes the issue all the time for some important features. It is easy for our developers to fix the bugs quickly.

We also notice that ArcGIS Rest API can’t handle localization of date format in some EMEA countries very well. In this case, it is out of our control. We need to report the bugs to ESRI.

The quick workaround is to ask users to change the date format to English (United States), it will work.