time-zone - Code of Matt

CodeMash 2017

Today, I had the pleasure of speaking at CodeMash 2017. The slides for my talk, entitled "How to Have the Best Dates Ever!" are available here. I also recorded the presentation, and you can watch it on YouTube here (or below). If you attended my talk - Thanks! Please feel

time-zone

Windows Registry Patch for Egypt 2016 Cancellation of DST

As you may know if you follow my blog, I previously wrote about the recent time zone chaos in Egypt. In this post I'd like to offer some guidance on what to do about it. On Microsoft Windows desktop or server operating systems, you may find that the time will

time-zone

Time Zone Chaos Inevitable in Egypt

I would like to give everyone a heads up about the situation in Egypt. There is likely to be some confusion over the next week or so about what the local time is in Egypt, and it's entirely possible that the computers of the world may be erroneously blamed for

time-zone

On the Timing of Time Zone Changes

What do Turkey, Chile, Russia, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, North Korea and Haiti all have in common? Time Zone Chaos! No, that's not the punchline to a joke. It's actually quite a serious problem. The biggest issue with time zones is not that they exist, nor that they have daylight saving time.

.NET

Beware the Edge (cases) of Time!

Ahh, time zones. There are so many wonderful traps to fall into. Consider this bit of code, from a recent blog post by Rick Strahl: /// <summary> /// Converts a local machine time to the user's timezone time /// by applying the difference between the two timezones. /// </summary> /// <

.NET

Five Common Daylight Saving Time Antipatterns of .NET Developers

It's 2015, and Daylight Saving Time is just around the corner. For most of North America, the clocks will "spring-forward" on Sunday, March 8th, stealing an hour of precious time from our daily routine. A few weeks later, the same thing will occur in much of Europe on Sunday, March

time-zone

What is a Time Zone?

Almost any time you call up a friend, relative, or business associate in another part of the world, you'll realize that your time isn't always the same as their time, and the reason is "time zones". You probably know a little about time zones already, but just what exactly is

.NET

Localized time zone names in .NET

If you've ever used the TimeZoneInfo class in the .NET framework, you probably know that it has properties intended for display of a time zone to the end user. Specifically, these are the DisplayName, StandardName, and DaylightName properties. However, there are a few problems with these. Unlike many other items

time-zone

Russia 2014 Time Zone Changes

Are you prepared for Russia's major time zone changes? If you are either in Russia yourself, or interact with Russian customers or users, you will need to ensure your time zone data has been updated before the changes go into effect on October 26th, 2014. If you are scheduling future

talks

Pluralsight - Date and Time Fundamentals

I'm happy to announce that the video course I've been working on for Pluralsight, "Date and Time Fundamentals" has finally been released! Here's one of my favorite slides: But seriously - There's a lot of great material in here. Have you ever needed to know how to calculate someone's age?

time-zone

UTC vs GMT

I'm not going to dive into a history lesson here. This is about practical, usable information in today's modern world. You can always go read more about GMT and UTC on Wikipedia. What is the difference between UTC and GMT? Essentially, nothing.Really? There is no difference? Technically, UTC is

time-zone

Egypt goes back to Daylight Saving Time

With only a week's notice, the government of Egypt has decided to go back to daylight saving time - effective today. That's right, it was casually announced on May 7th, and went into place at Midnight on May 15th. That is, at 24:00 May 15th, which most folks would

time-zone

Time Zone Abbreviations

What does the abbreviation EST mean? I'm sure you've seen that before. If you live in the United States, you might recognize it as "Eastern Standard Time", which is a time zone used in places like New York City, Washington D.C., and Miami. However, during a significant portion of

date-time

Handling Birthdays, and Other Anniversaries

How old are you? Simple question, yes? Perhaps. But the answer could change depending on the granularity of the question, and on your perspective. To answer "how many minutes old are you?", we need a lot more information than might be readily available: Your date and exact time of birthThe

.NET

Working with Time Zone Names in .Net

UPDATE: I've made a library to do this work for you. Read Localized time zone names in .NET. If you've ever used the TimeZoneInfo object in .Net, you'll be familiar with the following properties: timeZoneInfo.Id // "Eastern Standard Time" timeZoneInfo.StandardName // "Eastern Standard Time" timeZoneInfo.DaylightName

Azure

Windows Azure Scheduler

Microsoft announced today a new managed service for Windows Azure: The Windows Azure Scheduler. This is basically an enterprise job scheduler, such as Quartz.net, but operated as a simple managed web service. Basically, you can set up a job that will run once or periodically, and it will either

JavaScript

JavaScript Date type is horribly broken

JavaScript dates have always been a bit funny. As a .Net developer, there was a bit of a mind-shift for me, because they are inherently different than types like DateTime or DateTimeOffset. But I won't spend too much time on what they are not, lets just talk about what they