Migration from local server to Azure: TIMEZONE UTC. How to solve?

datetime azure utc datetimeoffset
Marco Staffoli picture Marco Staffoli · Jun 28, 2011 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

I designed my application considering the fact that, according to the specifications, should run on a server located in Italy and clients will be italian people only.

About a month ago, my bos decided to bring it all on Azure.

Everything went smoothly. The only thing that give me some problem is the fact that the time server is UTC.

The solutions are:

A) simple

modify a startup script to the server time ( http://netindonesia.net/blogs/wely/archive/2011/06/26/setting-timezone-in-windows-azure.aspx )

B) more laborious

Change to make any application to use UTC and show the time properly converted to local time.

If i go for the solution A my doubt is that the fact that the server is set up with a different timezone can somehow create conflicts with Azure.

This is true?

Answer

Marco Staffoli picture Marco Staffoli · Jun 28, 2011

I have asked to MS support.

This is the response:

Changing the server time on the Azure Virtual Machines using a startup task is not recommended, you should rather use methods like TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUTCTime in your code.

So I will not change the server timezone. Waiting for a response from the support I discover that SqlServer 2008 have a DateTimeOffset data type that is perfect!

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidrickard/archive/2012/04/07/system-datetime-good-practices-and-common-pitfalls.aspx

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