Brad Abrams leads us to a new BCL Blog posting on DateTime by Anthony Moore.
After noting that changing DateTime to use Utc Dates is impractical, Anthony recommends how to serialize dates in binary and text formats.
The comments section raises issues I have in mind. Namely:
- Whidbey should include a new class that supports Utc internal date format.
- All dates should be stored as Utc. My personal feeling is that only display should be tied to timezone of the local user, everything else should be UTC.
- Some dates are truly timezone neutral, such as time-of-day values and dates, such as birth dates.
An interesting note here is that SQL Server 2005 will include a DateTime that remembers it's timezone. I couldn't find more information on it (Does anyone have a good posting explaining the new datatypes?), but I did find that (as is just mentioned) .NET 2.0 will not support the new Date and Time types.
Note MSDN already has a good outline of DateTime best practices.