How to convert time between timezones (UTC to EDT)

Question

I need to have a common function to convert UTC time to EDT. I have a server in India. An application in it needs to use EDT time for all time purposes.

I am using .NET 3.5.

I found this on some other forum.

DateTime eastern = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(
        DateTime.UtcNow, "Eastern Standard Time");

When i tried with "Easten Daylight Time" I got an error.

"The time zone ID 'Eastern Daylight Time' was not found on the local computer".

Please help with this or any other solution.

Answer 1

The cowboy method is to take the UTC time, subtract four hours' worth of seconds from it (the timezone offset), format it using a UTC formatting function, and slap a "EDT" label on it.

If you need to use Daylight Time sometimes and Standard Time other times, either make a lookup table of switchover dates, or use some calendar function.

Answer 2

I would have said that you should use UTC for calculations of time periods, so that you avoid issues of daylight saving time and then use LocalTime for display only.

DateTime.ToLocalTime for UTC to whatever the local time zone is and then DateTime.ToUniversalTime to convert from local time to UTC.

Edit after comment 1

Do I take it then that you're after displaying a different timezone to that of the server?

If you're using web pages to access your server then use HttpRequest.UserLanguages to help create a CultureInfo object and use that to parse your DateTime object. Look here for a full explanation:Microsoft link on displaying local user time for web pages.

If you're using client-server architecture then if the LocalTime call is on the client side it will display the LocalTime for the client. You then convert it to UTC to send back to your server.

Either way your server doesn't need to know where the client is so if you have multiple clients in multiple timezones then all calculations will match. It will also allow you to show the times in any timezone that you wish by use of different Culture objects.

Edit 2 copied my second comment

You can get time data in UTC format from the server. Then you can convert it using DateTime.ToLocalTime or DateTime.ToUniversalTime as requried. If you're including dates as well and need to cope with say US MM/dd/yyyy and european dd/MM/yyyy formats the you can use CultureInfo class to parse the DateTime value accordingly. It sounds like more work than what you have at the moment, but it would mean that if you move your server again then you don't need to recode the DateTime handling.

A new point

Another point to look at is clock synchronisation between the server and the clients using NTP (Network Time Protocol) or SNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol) if it is accurate enough. I don't know what OS you are using but this is used by Windows Server time services to synchronise networks.

Answer 3

Eastern Daylight Time isn't the name of a "full" time zone - it's "half" a time zone, effectively, always 4 hours behind UTC. (There may be proper terminology for this, but I'm not aware of it.)

Why would you want to use EDT for times which don't have daylight savings applied? If you want a custom time zone that always has the same offset to UTC, use TimeZoneInfo.CreateCustomTimeZone.

Note that if you use get the Eastern Standard timezone (TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time")) then that will still have daylight saving time applied appropriately (i.e. during summer).

For example:

TimeZoneInfo tzi = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");

// Prints True
Console.WriteLine(tzi.IsDaylightSavingTime(new DateTime(2009, 6, 1)));
// Prints False
Console.WriteLine(tzi.IsDaylightSavingTime(new DateTime(2009, 1, 1)));