Re: Finding the offset of a specific time zone

You're approaching this from the wrong direction.  The only way to solve this issue is for the applications to only send UTC/GMT dates to the server.  The server doesn't know where dates came from, only that they are dates.  Unless these dates are UTC/GMT there's no way to convert the date to a particular locale.

Whatever reads the date from the database would read the UTC/GMT date and convert that to whatever local date/time it needs to display it in.

Remember that a "time zone time offset" is dependant on the date/time in which is required.  In Estern dates in daylight savings time the offset will be -5, in standard time the offset will be -4.
i.e. the offset depends on what the date/time is.


-- Peter

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:11:18 -0400, Eddie Lascu <[email protected]> wrote:

>Hello folks,
>
>Here is a problem I am facing right now. I work on an application that will
>be hosted on some servers located in Florida. The application collects data
>from some field devices located in California. The field devices contain a
>time stamp that represents the date and time when the device was last time
>updated. This, obviously, comes as Pacific local time. Every time a record
>related to the actual device is updated in the database, the application
>must update a date&time field. Since the application runs in Florida, this
>will be Eastern local time.
>
>I need to somehow be able to save these times in relation to UTC. The
>database is Oracle and it has two components, a date and time and an offset
>to the UTC. My question is whether I can somehow figure out programmatically
>what is the offset to UTC for various time zones.
>
>For the server where the application runs I can do something like this:
>
>DateTime dtNow = DateTime.Now;
>DateTime dtUtcNow = dtNow.ToUniversalTime();
>double dOffset = (dtUtcNow - dtNow).TotalHours;
>
>The question is how can I find out the offset of the time stamp that comes
>from the field device. Is there any method in .Net that will give me that?
>
>.NET 3.5 has TimeZoneInfo, a class that seems to solve this very issue, but
>we are using a .NET 3.0 environment and TimeZoneInfo is not available. Does
>anyone has any idea how this can be achieved in .NET 3.0?
>Any suggestion will be highly appreciated.
>
>Regards,
>Eddie
>
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