UTC converted to Central Europe Standard Time is 2 hours in front not 1

Question

I'm trying to understand why my date is wrong:

DateTime databaseUtcTime = new DateTime(2016, 8, 15, 10, 20, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc);
var timeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Central Europe Standard Time");
var testDateTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUtc(databaseUtcTime, timeZone);

testDateTime outputs 15/08/2016 12:20:00 rather than 15/08/2016 11:20:00 why is this? Shouldn't it be 1 hour forward from UTC, not 2 ?

EDIT----

Thanks Jon Skeet,

If this helps anyone, i resorted to using:

if(testDateTime.IsDaylightSavingTime())
{
    testDateTime = testDateTime.AddHours(-1);
}

Albeit you not knowing the context, this could be helpful to know how to get rid of daylight saving time when running certain explicit testing on time.

It is time to turn into NodaTime. (That's a good catchphrase) : https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime — Zein Makki, Aug 15 '16 at 13:09

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 15 '16 at 13:07

7

The time zone with an ID of "Central Europe Standard Time" is just the one used by central Europe... it doesn't really mean standard time.

As central Europe is observing daylight savings at the moment, the offset really is UTC+2.

It's very unfortunate that the IDs used in Windows time zones are misleading like this... but the TimeZoneInfo implementation itself is correct.

(This isn't all that's wrong with Windows time zone names... see Matt Johnson's post on the matter for more...)

answered Aug 15 '16 at 13:07

Jon Skeet

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Jon Skeet, the programmer version of Jo(h)n Cena. – Jimmyt1988 Aug 15 '16 at 13:16
@Jimmyt1988 People would argue if that is a compliment since you compared him to someone who gets mixed reactions. This is not the case for Mr. Skeet. – Zein Makki Aug 15 '16 at 13:46
Hahaha @user3185569 - Sorry, i should have said chuck norris. – Jimmyt1988 Aug 15 '16 at 14:01

UTC converted to Central Europe Standard Time is 2 hours in front not 1

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