Prevent timezone conversion on deserialization of DateTime value

c# datetime xml-serialization timezone
Odrade picture Odrade · Jul 6, 2010 · Viewed 37.3k times · Source

I have a class that I serialize/deserialize using XmlSerializer. This class contains a DateTime field.

When serialized, the DateTime field is represented by a string that includes the offset from GMT, e.g 2010-05-05T09:13:45-05:00. When deserialized, these times are converted to the local time of the machine performing the deserialization.

For reasons not worth explaining, I'd like to prevent this timezone conversion from happening. The serialization happens out in the wild, where multiple version of this class exist. The deserialization happens on a server that's under my control. As such, it seems like this would be best handled during deserialization.

How can I make this happen, other than implementing IXmlSerializable and doing all of the deserialization "by hand?"

Answer

Arvi picture Arvi · Oct 15, 2013

What I did, it was to use DateTime.SpecifyKind method, as following: 

DateTime dateTime = DateTime.SpecifyKind(DateTime.Now, DateTimeKind.Unspecified);

And this resolve my problem, I hope this help you.

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