Question

I have some JavaScript code that I’m trying to pass to my web service. My JavaScript code is supposed to send a date in UTC format. Locally, the time that I generated my code at was at 12:30:43 pm. When I executed my JavaScript code, the following date/time was generated:

2012-06-03T20:30:43.000Z

That date/time was generated from this code:

var now = new Date();
var utcDate = new Date(
  now.getUTCFullYear(),
  now.getUTCMonth(),
  now.getUTCDate(),
  now.getUTCHours(),
  now.getUTCMinutes(),
  now.getUTCSeconds()
);

When I pass the date/time from JavaScript back to my web service, it is serialized as shown here:

20120603163043

That looks correct to me at this point. I then need to take that string and convert it to a date/time in C#. In an attempt to do that, I’m using the following C# code:

DateTime _value = DateTime.MinValue;
DateTime.TryParseExact(value, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal, out _value)

When that happens, I get the following date/time.
6/3/2012 12:30:43 PM

What am I doing wrong? I was expecting the date/time to be 6/3/2012 4:30:43 PM

Answer 1

The result you get is correct, but please check the Kind property of your DateTime. You’ll notice it’s not set to UTC but to Local.

You can use DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal to generate a DateTime with Kind set to UTC.

DateTime dateTime;
DateTime.TryParseExact(
    value,
    "yyyyMMddHHmmss",
    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
    DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal | DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal,
    out dateTime);

See it working on ideone.