British Summer Time (BST) not handled by .Net

Question

I am currently consuming an RSS feed in .Net (luckily still testing).

I noticed that the feed was throwing an invalid datetime error.

It appears that .Net doesn't handle BST times as this is not a valid timezone in windows.

Take the following dates

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:00:06 GMT

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 17:00:00 BST

THe second string is not a valid datetime if you try to parse it using something like this

if (!DateTime.TryParse(dateString, out dt))
    dt = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString, CustomUtcDateTimeFormat, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Is this really the case?

I know I can write something to remove the timezone but really?

Well what's `CustomUtcDateTimeFormat`? We don't have enough information at the moment to reproduce the problem. — Jon Skeet, Apr 01 '14 at 18:13
possible duplicate of [C# british summer time (BST) timezone abbreviation](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10126252/c-sharp-british-summer-time-bst-timezone-abbreviation) — Maurice Reeves, Apr 01 '14 at 18:18
British Standard Time or Bangladesh Standard Time? CST is a dozy, it can mean 3 different zones. How do you expect .NET to tell the difference? It doesn't. — Hans Passant, Apr 01 '14 at 18:41
Jon, quite simple to reproduce the problem, you'd think with all your points you'd be able to work that out? Hans, you and your comment are a waste of time. Maurice, thanks for your answer. It is a duplication I would say so you are correct. Not sure how I missed that. — 72GM, Apr 02 '14 at 18:47

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 15 '16 at 23:02

1

Microsoft's .NET framework considers BST the same as GMT Daylight Time.

There is a more complete date and time management framework available for .NET, Noda Time.

Noda Time uses the TZ Database for its time zones, which includes BST.

edited Mar 15 '16 at 23:02

ErikE

answered Apr 01 '14 at 18:17

Erik Nedwidek

thanks for the info. I'll probably just reformat the input string tho... cheers – 72GM Apr 02 '14 at 18:51

1 Answers1