Tag: time zone
Use System.DateTimeOffset To Better Handle Time Zones
Posted by bsstahl on 2008-12-25 and Filed Under: development
In his post, The Death of System.DateTime? Omer van Kloeten evaluates the use of the System.DateTimeOffset object in place of System.DateTime to improve handling of Time Zone sensitive times.
When representing a date/time, especially in an internationally-faced system, you have to include a time-zone. DateTime did a very poor job handling time-zones, like being insensitive to changes. DateTimeOffset is the exact same thing as DateTime, only it takes heed of time-zones. For instance, comparing two DateTimeOffsets with the same UTC time in different time-zones will result in equality.
Moreover, DateTime also had only three modes: Local, UTC and Unspecified, whereas DateTimeOffset has an Offset property, allowing you to create dates in any time-zone you like.
I have not yet experimented with the System.DateTimeOffset type but what Omer says makes a lot of sense to me. Has anyone else played with this object?