Create an XML Schema Enumeration of Supported .NET CultureInfo with Powershell

Here’s a Powershell script to generate the enumeration elements of an XML Schema simpleType restriction.  The first command loads the .NET Assembly you’ll need, sysglobl.dll.

PS> [System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("sysglobl, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken= b03f5f7f11d50a3a, processorArchitecture=MSIL")
PS> [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultures([System.Globalization.CultureTypes]::FrameworkCultures)
| ? {$_.Name.Trim().Length -eq 5} | % { "<xs:enumeration value=`"$_`"/>"} | Out-File cultures.txt

See my earlier post on locale identifiers for more background.

XML Schema dateTime Primer for C# Developers

The XML Schema dateTime primitive data type represents the current date and time (June 10th, 2008 at 9:30am Eastern Daylight Savings at the time of this writing) in the following format:

2008-06-10T13:30:00Z

The above format represents the UTC date/time.  UTC, or coordinated universal time, is just Greenwich Mean Time (or Zulu time, hence the "Z").  UTC is the SI name for this zero time offset.  To get the UTC date/time for your local time, simply add your time zone offset.  In Indiana, where I'm from, our GMT offset is currently -04:00 (colloquially, "four hours behind").

Here's a C# one-liner to format the current time in the XML Schema dateTime format.

string xsDateTime = System.DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime().ToString("o");