Is it because some culture format issue?
Yes. Your user must be in a culture where the time separator is a dot. Both ":" and "/" are interpreted in a culture-sensitive way in custom date and time formats.
How can I make sure the result string is delimited by colon instead of dot?
I'd suggest specifying CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
:
string text = dateTime.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss.fff",
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Alternatively, you could just quote the time and date separators:
string text = dateTime.ToString("MM'/'dd'/'yyyy HH':'mm':'ss.fff");
... but that will give you "interesting" results that you probably don't expect if you get users running in a culture where the default calendar system isn't the Gregorian calendar. For example, take the following code:
using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;
class Test
{
static void Main()
{
DateTime now = DateTime.Now;
CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("ar-SA"); // Saudi Arabia
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture;
Console.WriteLine(now.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fff"));
}
}
That produces output (on September 18th 2013) of:
11/12/1434 15:04:31.750
My guess is that your web service would be surprised by that!
I'd actually suggest not only using the invariant culture, but also changing to an ISO-8601 date format:
string text = dateTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fff");
This is a more globally-accepted format - it's also sortable, and makes the month and day order obvious. (Whereas 06/07/2013 could be interpreted as June 7th or July 6th depending on the reader's culture.)