Comments on: Time zone limbo

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:59:15 +0000

no dimlight saving in the NT, time for a beer though … zulu time everywhere I say …

By: robfarley

robfarley — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:16:29 +0000

Hi Jeremy,

I’m actually sold on the idea of using datetimeoffset instead of UTC-time. SQL2008 definitely provides useful ways of converting from one timezone to another, but I don’t want to store the information about when daylight savings has switched.

Rob

By: Jeremy Huppatz

Jeremy Huppatz — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:55:17 +0000

Hey Rob

I agree on the time zone thing – UTC for the win. 🙂 Even if you do a local time-zone offset at the presentation level, the shenannigans that have been going on with time zones in the US, Australia and other parts of the world over the last 3 years have convinced me that DB time fields should *ALWAYS* be UTC-based. Adding in a table with current time-zone conversions, and a a function to convert the UTC time to the user’s locale should make it much easier to manage the impact of time-zone changes.

By: robfarley

robfarley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:07:06 +0000

The one I also love is Outlook. Ignoring daylight savings time… if I put an ‘all day event’ in Outlook and then change time zones, it suddenly thinks that my all-day event is across two days, starting at 2300/2330/0030/0100 depending on the travel.

Crazy… I want an option in Outlook that says “All day event, ignoring time zone”

Rob

By: Matt Hamilton

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:31:18 +0000

I feel your pain, Rob. Our main data-entry application here at work runs on WM2003 devices, and we’ve only gotten about half of it ported away from DataSets to POCOs. The result is that .NET does some weird timezone-shifting magic when the data moves from the device to the server, and dates that should be 12 midnight are stored as 1am (or 11pm depending on which “daylight saving witching week” you’re in at the time).

We were able to get a patch from the device vendor but not in time to roll out to every device by this week. Hopefully we’ll have the rest of the app ported by the time this happens again in spring!

By: Paul Stovell

Paul Stovell — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:46:44 +0000

What really makes me laugh, is Brisbane is actually half an hour BEHIND Adelaide. Yes, behind. Then when the time zone settings switch, Brisbane is suddenly half an hour in front.

I’d love to see the globe that these idiots who dream up the timezones use. On their map, every April, Australia must tilt 45 degrees anti-clockwise.