I started coding again, and I realized that a major headache of our system is the handling of dates. I think in future the design of a new system must cater very specifically for how dates are written. It's just like how using imperial measurements caused the mars lander to disintegrate - different date formats just cause more trouble then any supposed benefit they may have. So from now on, use letters for the month element. Anyway this post is about how IIS manages your dates and how SQL Server manages your dates. If the two don't align, then you have a problem. IIS runs under a service account and that account has its own regional setting which is set at the time you installed your OS. Can't change that without changing the registry settings. The best option is to set the value explicitly in the web.config setting like so: SQL Server sets its regional setting via the language option of the user credential which you used to run queries. There, my first post in many months. Back to programming.