I see, so nothing to do with the culture. I must have been using an older version of Examine (maybe 0.9.2.0) that got upgraded when I copied over the 4.5.2 bin folder. Will the new version in the next RC be a standard date format that .NET can parse as is?

Thanks for your help.

You can try the latest source in Umbraco, that's got a revamped way which Examine handles dates and pushes them into Lucene.

Previously we were only storing text fields and using the Lucene.Net DateTools API to transform them and push them in. Now we're leaving it at a config level to define whether you want to have it handled as a date or left as a string, but it's currently not documented so you'll have to look into the code if you wanted to use it. But there's still the question of how to push that back into the search results since Lucene doesn't store information about what fields were added as numbers (aka dates) or strings.

Otherwise you can use DateTime.ParseExact to convert the stored string into a DateTime object: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w2sa9yss.aspx

Have made a piece of helper code for this format

        public static string GetFormattedDateTime(string date, string format)
        {
            if (date.Length != 17) return null;

            try
            {
                DateTime dateTime = new DateTime(int.Parse(date.Substring(0, 4)), int.Parse(date.Substring(4, 2)),
                                                 int.Parse(date.Substring(6, 2)));
                return dateTime.ToString(format);
            }
            catch
            {
                return null;
            }

        }

And some unit test

        [Test]
        public void should_return_the_good_date_format()
        {
            string dateTime = UmbracoHelper.GetFormattedDateTime("20101117000000000");

            Assert.AreEqual("17 november 2010", dateTime);
        }

        [Test]
        public void should_return_null_on_empty()
        {
            string dateTime = UmbracoHelper.GetFormattedDateTime("");

            Assert.AreEqual(null, dateTime);
        }

        [Test]
        public void should_return_null_on_bad_date_format()
        {
            string dateTime = UmbracoHelper.GetFormattedDateTime("00001332000000000");

            Assert.AreEqual(null, dateTime);
        }

Wound up with something similar, but took Slace's advice and went with ParseExact - a little cleaner than the substrings

if (adt.Length > 8) adt = adt.Substring(0, 8);
DateTime.TryParseExact(adt, "yyyyMMdd", CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);

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