Hi Jon
Over time, I've worked out that the following are just some of the
nightmare worlds it's best not to delve too far into:
o Dates and times, with timezones etc
One thing that has always intrigued me (as an antipodean) is how Americans
(apologies if you are not from the USA) can ignore timezones. After all you
have three across the USA, and many applications must have to deal with
this.
I was suprised the the .NET framework decided only to support the local
computer's timezone. With outsourcing across the world being popular these
days, timezone support is a necessity. Fortunately there are some freeware
classes out there that support timezones on Windows at least. But there are
no user controls to my knowledge that will correctly validate local times.
For instance 2003-03-16 02:30:00 is ambiguous in NZ, as that day we went off
dayliight saving and had two of them. Similarly the time 2003-10-05 02:30:00
will not occur, since we go back on to daylight saving that day.
Around 1993 I built such controls for Informix 4GL under Unix. I thought the
world would have caught up by now!
I think this is an ommission from the framework that should be fixed as soon
as possible.
Regards
Ron