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I disagree. At the time, "Railway Time" was an excellent response to the issue where every town had their own idea of what the current time was, which made train scheduling confusing for both the railway companies and the traveling public.
Nowadays, though, you should probably store DateTime objects in UTC or Unix-Epoch or some other non-local time format, and convert to local time as needed.
I've seen various arguments for doing everything in UTC, but I can't see that as gaining traction. People, being people, are going to want to have solar noon more-or-less match the clock reading 12:00 [Pedantic note: noon is neither AM (Ante-Meridian: before midday) or PM (Post-Meridian: after midday)]. Though maybe that's an old fogey perspective, and it will be like the metric system, with eventually only the US sticking to the old ways.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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Totally agree. Well, except I believe that everything should be stored in UTC. Just get used to it already.
But, especially before the Internet and globalization, anti-timezone peeps act like not having a timezone would be better. But, just imagine the chaos of morning sunrise happening at 11:00PM. It's just trading one confusion for another. People want to act smart by looking behind them (easy to do) and insulting things. But, I can promise, given the state of the world, most everyone would be agreeing to use them if they were alive and well during that time.
IMO daylight savings time did more harm than timezones. Again, I can see why it was created. But, it caused more issues than timezones. Timezones were never really an issue.
Jeremy Falcon
modified 24-Jul-24 11:53am.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: everything should be stored in UTC
I've been using Unix Epoch (seconds since Jan 1, 1970 UTC+0) i.e. a time_t to store most times since the late 80's. Which is the same idea. It represents a fixed moment in time, and what semantic interpretation is up to any locale information that's active at any given moment.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Well, except I believe that everything should be stored in UTC. I did this and then calculated back to the current time zone.
So then the customer called and said someone did something in the middle of the night, which was unthinkable.
After looking it up I said that person was in another time zone (on vacation) and did something that was middle of the night for him.
It was decided that everything should always be stored and shown in their HQ time zone, even when on vacation or when the apocalypse hits.
Loved the simplicity, stored current time and never looked back
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So then display the time info in the appropriate time. There's no rule saying you can't do that. UTC is just internal to the app. Good luck doing datetime math in local time all over the world. It'll be a living nightmare.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: IMO daylight savings time did more harm than timezones. 1000% this
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I use DateTimeOffset instead of storing in UTC.
Too many things can go wrong in the conversion when using DateTime. I have seen highly experienced developers doing stupid things like DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime()
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Not using UTC because some developers do stupid things, is hardly a great idea.
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Why would it be better to use DateTime than DateTimeOffset?
Edit: and why would you not want to minimize the possibility of doing stupid things?
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No idea, I never said it was.
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You said it was not a great idea? I agree it is hard to clasify as "great", just an extremely simple way to minimize a problem.
modified 24-Jul-24 13:00pm.
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Storing local times for any application is a bad idea. I'm sure Richard is just speaking from experience.
Jeremy Falcon
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Why would it be a bad idea to store DateTimeOffset?
The way to store date/time I have the most experience with is DateTime stored as UTC. But I see no reason to go back to that - what is the benefit?
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My understanding of DateTimeOffset is that it's still a local time, but with offset information. Soooooo, if I'm correct with that... The reason why it's bad is you're adding complexity for no real gain. That date time is still only relevant to you. If you have an application that is used all over the world, then you now must do two calculations to show a time to a user rather than one.
Jeremy Falcon
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No, what I actually said was Quote: Not using UTC because some developers do stupid things, is hardly a great idea. .My point being that to do, or not do, something because some other developer may make a mistake, or do something stupid, is not really good decision making. It was not meant to be specific to DateTime or DateTimeOffset.
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Oh, that is clearer then.
Funnily enough I can't really find any better reason to make a decision than avoiding developers making mistakes.
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lmoelleb wrote: I use DateTimeOffset instead of storing in UTC. I don't do .NET these days, but would that not use the same conversions internally to figure out the offset? So, what's the advantage over just converting to UTC and sticking with it?
Jeremy Falcon
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The main advantage is that it natively protect against mistakes.
It does not use the same logic internally as DateTime - it stores the offset instead of DateTimeKind.
You never have to deal with DateTimeKind.Unknown (primary reason for mistakes I have seen).
You never have some database layer having to be told if it is local time or utc.
If some idiot use local time... Then nothing happens because it still accurately represents a unique point in time - no matter where in the world that local time was used.
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Well, I don't know enough about the C# structures to speak intelligently on the matter. So, there's an 82.5% chance I'm talking out of my arse. But, generally speaking, it's bad to store anything in local time. And trying to make code idiot proof is impossible, especially at the expense of making the code harder to follow. That's what code reviews are for. You're adding more complication to the product just because of a DateTimeKind.Unknown situation when it's so much easier to just keep everything in UTC.
Jeremy Falcon
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I was using DateTime in a generic way, meaning an object that expresses a point in time, whether a Database object, program variable or datum in a flat file. I did not intend to refer to any specific version of a Date/Time object.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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Even outside time zones it's all hard enough.
We are now contending with the slowing of the earth spinning causing days to be ms longer.
We'll soon start to contend with time in space, not to be confused with space-time.
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jochance wrote: We are now contending with the slowing of the earth spinning causing days to be ms longer. Most people don't realize that. Every year gets a bit longer. It's something like a day getting longer by about 1.8 milliseconds per century, which is something like 657.45 MS (almost a second) every 100 years. So, in the future, we may need a new calendar system to account for it.
Jeremy Falcon
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It's a YT video. It's supposed to make things dramatic and conflicted. Any real professional programmer should know how to deal with timezones this day and age. There's no excuse, unless you're an intern or something like that.
Jeremy Falcon
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Yet I have seen a developer I would clarify as highly competent do "DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime()".
I have seen code break because it did not handle DateTimeKind.Unknown and some upstream code changed.
Yes, it is quite simple, yet mistakes happens.
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