Bugfix request:- Date input strings are not read according to local date format. (no reply to post on: March 12, 2013)
This is a request to fix a non fatal, but quite annoying bug which occurs in English speaking countries where the date format is "dd-MM-yy". Media Center displays existing date information correctly according to the local system preferences, however, the input parser for date fields assumes that the input string conforms to the US style date format: "MM-dd-yy". Consequently it reads 09-11-yyyy as September 11, when it should know that the 9th of November is intended in this context.
The parsing algorithm has some versatility because it will change its interpretation if one of the first two digits happen to be greater than 12 - but this self adjustment does not work for the first twelve days of every month. (Similar problems with non-US date formats are annoyingly common. For example, Windows Media Player cannot produce a "Recently Added" list for the first 12 days of every month. This suggest to me that faulty assumptions might be built into the code libraries which programmers use to create applications like MC and MediaPlayer, although it could be that the issue is invisible to US code writers generally.)
Perhaps I am alone and there is something unique to my system (AMD processor & WinXP32), however I feel there must be many MC customers in the UK and other countries with British heritage, which employ the "dd-mm-yy" date convention, who have confronted this problem.
Consequences... Reentering a displayed date field such as 09-11-01 replaces the month with the date and vice versa because the assumed input format does not match the output format. The displayed value changes to 11-09-01, and pressing enter on this new text, swaps the date and month back again. When the user learns to always input dates using the US format (MM-dd-yy) regardless of the local display format, life can become bearable - that is, until you want to edit a Time field on a photograph (for example).
In this example, to change the time record I was actually editing a combined Date-Time field, so the original displayed date was parsed as if it was a new date input, along with the modified time field. It is frustrating to have to manually repair corrupted date information whenever a time field is modified. This is terribly inconvenient and needs to be fixed.