Remember that situation where you needed to convert a string representation of a DateTime to a valid DataTime using the BizTalk mapper? No? Well, I do. The parsing of the string as a DateTime is not the real problem here. Once you know how the string is formatted it is simply writing a way to parse it, either using substrings or using the DateTime.Parse method. Once you have a DateTime though, you need to format it to be valid according to the XSD spec. That’s exactly where DateTimes and the BizTalk mapper can give you a headache. Especially when you’re dealing with different locales under which BizTalk is running this can be quite cumbersome. There is however a good way of converting a string to a valid datetime and I’ll show you how in the following code sample:

// We'll be using the W3cXsd2001class from the Metadata namespace
using System.Runtime.Remoting.Metadata;

// Parse a string as a DateTime. This could be a string coming
// from the source message.
DateTime myDateTime = DateTime.Parse("07/01/2008");

// This method returns the current DateTime into a xs:DateTime
string dateTimeString = W3cXsd2001.SoapDateTime.ToString( myDateTime );

Happy coding