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I'm working in a EasyPost integration making a class library to make the use of their API simpler and I'm getting this error:

Managed Debugging Assistant 'DateTimeInvalidLocalFormat' has detected a problem in 'C:\Projects\TestClient.vshost.exe'.

Additional information: A UTC DateTime is being converted to text in a format that is only correct for local times. This can happen when calling DateTime.ToString using the 'z' format specifier, which will include a local time zone offset in the output. In that case, either use the 'Z' format specifier, which designates a UTC time, or use the 'o' format string, which is the recommended way to persist a DateTime in text. This can also occur when passing a DateTime to be serialized by XmlConvert or DataSet. If using XmlConvert.ToString, pass in XmlDateTimeSerializationMode.RoundtripKind to serialize correctly. If using DataSet, set the DateTimeMode on the DataColumn object to DataSetDateTime.Utc.

I get this error when I call the Create method in the EasyPost Shipment object. Code below:

Shipment shipment = new Shipment() {
  to_address = toAddress,
  from_address = fromAddress,
  parcel = parcel
};

shipment.Create();

This create function probably makes a call to their REST API and is trying to convert a json response into one of their models.

To solve the error I'm trying to set the UTC as the default of my library so whenever I use DateTime.ToString() I use the DateTime.ToString("o"). I don't know if this would actually solve the problem, but I don't know how to force it (use UTC as the library default). I have tried the piece of code below, but it doesn't work

CultureInfo newCulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = newCulture;

Can you help me?

André Luiz
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1 Answers1

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I'm one of the developers on the EasyPost client libraries.

As far as I can find in some basic research, there's no (easy) way to set a default time zone for a C# application. Most of the blog posts and other SO answers I found suggest using utility functions to convert a UTC datetime object to a local datetime object when trying to display it to a string.

EasyPost's API returns all datetimes in UTC time + timezone information (ex. 2022-10-24T12:37:24-06:00), which is accounted for when the JSON is deserialized into a DateTime object in the C# client library.

Nate Harris
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