Question

I am storing all my dates in UTC format in my database. I ask the user for their timezone and I want to use their time zone plus what I am guessing is the server time to figure out the UTC for them.

Once I have that I want to do a search to see what the range is in the database using their newly converted UTC date.

But I always get this exception.

System.ArgumentException was unhandled by user code  
Message="The conversion could not be completed because the   
supplied DateTime did not have the Kind property set correctly.  
For example, when the Kind property is DateTimeKind.Local,   
the source time zone must be TimeZoneInfo.Local.  
Parameter name: sourceTimeZone"

I don’t know why I am getting this.

I tried 2 ways

 TimeZoneInfo zone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(id);
 // I also tried DateTime.UtcNow
 DateTime now = DateTime.SpecifyKind(DateTime.Now, DateTimeKind.Local); 
 var utc = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(now , zone );

This failed so I tried

 DateTime now = DateTime.SpecifyKind(DateTime.Now, DateTimeKind.Local); 
 var utc = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(now, 
                                           ZoneId, TimeZoneInfo.Utc.Id);

This also failed with the same error. What am I doing wrong?

Edit Would this work?

 DateTime localServerTime = DateTime.SpecifyKind(DateTime.Now, DateTimeKind.Local);
 TimeZoneInfo info = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(id);

 var usersTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(localServerTime, info);

 var utc = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(usersTime, userInfo);

Edit 2 @ Jon Skeet

Yes, I was just thinking about that I might not even need to do all this. Time stuff confuses me right now so thats why the post may not be as clear as it should be. I never know what the heck DateTime.Now is getting (I tried to change my Timezone to another timezone and it kept getting my local time).

This is what I wanted to achieve: User comes to the site, adds some alert and it gets saved as utc (prior it was DateTime.Now, then someone suggested to store everything UTC).

So before a user would come to my site and depending where my hosting server was it could be like on the next day. So if the alert was said to be shown on August 30th (their time) but with the time difference of the server they could come on August 29th and the alert would be shown.

So I wanted to deal with that. So now I am not sure should I just store their local time then use this offset stuff? Or just store UTC time. With just storing UTC time it still might be wrong since the user still probably would be thinking in local time and I am not sure how UTC really works. It still could end up in a difference of time.

Edit3

 var info = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(id)

 DateTimeOffset usersTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(DataBaseUTCDate,
                                             TimeZoneInfo.Utc, info);

Answer 1

The DateTime structure supports only two timezones:

• The local timezone the machine is running in.
• and UTC.

Have a look at the DateTimeOffset structure.

var info = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Tokyo Standard Time");

DateTimeOffset localServerTime = DateTimeOffset.Now;

DateTimeOffset usersTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(localServerTime, info);

DateTimeOffset utc = localServerTime.ToUniversalTime();

Console.WriteLine("Local Time:  {0}", localServerTime);
Console.WriteLine("User's Time: {0}", usersTime);
Console.WriteLine("UTC:         {0}", utc);

Output:

Local Time:  30.08.2009 20:48:17 +02:00
User's Time: 31.08.2009 03:48:17 +09:00
UTC:         30.08.2009 18:48:17 +00:00