Easily Work With Differing Time Zones In An ASP.NET 3.5 Application

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Introduction

When working with ASP.NET applications, time zones are often a problem when dealing with DateTime structures. There are two different common scenarios that a developer is likely to encounter. The first is that you are placing the application on a hosted server that is in a different time zone than the business you are trying to operate. The second is that you have users from different time zones and would like to display the date and time to the user in their local time zone rather than the server's time zone.

Hosted Time Zone addresses this problem by providing two settings. ApplicationTimeZone sets the time zone to be used by the entire application. ThreadTimeZone sets the time zone to be used by the currently running thread, which defaults to the ApplicationTimeZone if no time zone has been specified on the thread. If you are using ThreadTimeZone then you need to be sure to set the value for each request made to the server. You will usually do this in your global.asax file, such as in the Application_BeginRequest handler.

Using the code

To actually perform the conversions you can call the ToAppTime, FromAppTime, ToThreadTime, or FromThreadTime static methods on the ApplicationTimeZone class. Additionally, extension methods have been declared for the DateTime and DateTimeOffset classes that perform the same functions more cleanly. In order for the extension methods to work you must import the HostedTimeZone namespace.

You should note that there are not any overloads for FromAppTime or FromThreadTime for the DateTimeOffset class. This is because the ToLocalTime method of DateTimeOffset performs the same function, so they would be redundant.

Points of Interest

This library requires the TimeZoneInfo class, which is not available until the .NET Framework 3.5. Therefore, it is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 or earlier.

History

1.0.0.0 6/18/2008 Initial Release

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2.0 version? Ronald Bastien 15:36 27 Oct '08   Is there a way to implement this using 2.0? Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: 2.0 version? BrantBurnett 18:43 28 Oct '08   Well, you can't use extension methods in 2.0, so you'd have to make it use Shared method calls instead. Also, the TimeZoneInfo class doesn't exist in 2.0. There is a TimeZone class, I believe, which does some similar stuff. However, according to the documentation that I recall it doesn't work as well. I'll do some research into the differences and let you know what I find. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: 2.0 version? BrantBurnett 5:06 4 Nov '08   I've done some more checking, and there is no easy way to implement this using .NET 2.0. There is a TimeZone class in 2.0, which was superseded by the TimeZoneInfo class in 3.5. However, the TimeZone class only represents the local time zone on the computer, and cannot represent any other time zone. Therefore, you would have to implement the conversion manually. You could store the UTC offset as a setting, instead of the actual time zone. Then use ToUniversalTime on the DateTime to convert it to UTC time, then add the offset to convert it to the target time zone. The problem with this is that it won't account for daylight savings time. Depending on time of year, your offset would be different. Basically, you have to worry about all the complicated stuff that TimeZoneInfo was figuring out for you in 3.5. If you need any more help with this, let me know. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Interesting merlin981 9:24 20 Jun '08   Thanks for sharing ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ LINQ Exchange - Learn about LINQ and Lambda Expressions Rhabot - World of Warcraft Bot Make long URLs short with NeatURL.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink

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