Re: Finding the offset of a specific time zone

 
Hi Peter,

That is exactly what I am trying to do, save the dates as UTC. The strings
that I get are local time stamps and the offset is not provided, so I need
to figure it out myself and then add it when I create the equivalent UTC
value. How do I get the offset?

Sorry if my explanations were clear as mud.

Regards,
Eddie


-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of advanced .NET topics.
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter Ritchie
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ADVANCED-DOTNET] 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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