C#/VB.NET PublicDomain Olson Time Zone Database Implementation

Phillip Guerra Phillip.Guerra at nkch.org
Wed Aug 29 18:49:24 UTC 2007


Kevin,

I'm not saying that your package is not helpful.  I'm just voicing my
feelings about it becoming adopted as a .Net standard for the Olson TZ
information.  Other's have provided solutions, and though difficult to
find, they are out there.  Now, admittedly, I do prefer to insall
classes that have pretty much a similar functions as opposed to those
that incororate extra features.  I do that mainly to better track what
I've loaded without a lot of hassle.  The naming convention follows
suit.  It may be silly, but there it is.  I don't think I'm alone in
those distinctions or reservations.  I do have contact with the .Net
world, being part a large web application community, and this particular
issue is still not resolved in that application for those very reasons.

I've followed this .Net integration topic for some while and have had
many discussions with folks over the last few years about it.  I know
that we can all agree on this issue: Microsoft needs to support the TZ
information rather than continue down their registry Timezones method.
So, with that in mind, I would propose, and hope to see a link to your
offering, and links to similar offerings appear as references. I do not
favor any O/S over another at this point, they all have issues. But, in
this area of timezone integration, I think the UNIX/Linux world gets the
nod.  Let folks decide for themselves what serves them best, and it's
better to offer the information than not.  I spent many hours surfing
the .Net looking for a solution before I finally came up with my own
that works for me.

The whole business really becomse a non-trivial task to overcome in the
Microsoft world, especially when developing for web applications that
use MS SQL.  It's really a challenge to provide web apps, when so many
hosting providers cannot standardize on basic timezone settings.  Of
course, it's all part of relying on MS to bear the task to standardize
on a better method. Just my thoughts, and wanted to clear up my last
post, which was not meant to discourage, though I can see I was not
clear.  I apologize to you.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin [mailto:hellosticky at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 6:15 PM
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Re: C#/VB.NET PublicDomain Olson Time Zone Database
Implementation

That is a fair criticism, however in its defense, the added
functionality in the package only adds a few hundred Kb to the size of
the DLL, so I do not understand the claim that non-TZ related code
"detracts from it's acceptance from a broad spectrum of .NET users."
Have you queried a broad spectrum/sample of .NET users?

The reason I think it is worth mentioning on the main page is that there
is no alternative, other than what Microsoft provides (as you mention,
the latest incarnation simply rounds a few edges, but makes no
significant advancements).

The sole reason why I created this package was because I could not find
such a package. Being in my shoes before I created it, I would not care
that it contained other code. Since all of the code is in the
PublicDomain, it would also be trivial for me to take out the TZ related
code (a few source files), and either build my own package or simply
insert the code files into my existing project.

However, as developer of the package, I will not create a separate
packaging of PublicDomain just to advance such a "pure"
implementation. I do not want to shatter code, and create intricate
co-dependencies, which defeats the purpose of the package as a milieu of
simple-to-use .NET code.

As for the name of the package, well I can't disagree with you, but I
don't think that it detract from the usefulness of propagating the olson
database throughout the .NET.

The net of my defense against the arguments of package size and naming
is that fundamentally it solves a problem that exists today -- lack of
olson database support in .NET. This severely impacts interoperability,
correctness, and functionality.

Thanks for the consideration

On 8/23/07, Phillip Guerra <Phillip.Guerra at nkch.org> wrote:
> When last I reviewed this package, it included a variety of 
> librairies, not just the tz implementation.  In my opinion, this 
> detracts from it's acceptance from a broad spectrum of .Net users.  
> There is alos criticism of the library name 'PublicDomain' as not 
> being descriptive of the contents of the library.
>
> Now, I've not used the library, but after my initial review, I would 
> not be an adopter of this particular implementation. I'm not sure if 
> it should be the .Net defacto implementation.  However, in fairness to

> the developer, it's a start for folks wondering about how to go about 
> this tz integration in a .Net MS world.  The lastest MS implementation

> of timezone information builds upon the already flawed practice of 
> storing information in the registry.  Although, the data structures 
> improved a bit, this implementation still leave a lot to be desired.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin [mailto:hellosticky at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 4:55 PM
> To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
> Subject: C#/VB.NET PublicDomain Olson Time Zone Database 
> Implementation
>
> Hi,
>
> I created a fully Public Domain .NET library which implements the 
> Olson time zone database for .NET applications. The package is called 
> PublicDomain and the source, binaries, and documentation are available

> at http://www.codeplex.com/PublicDomain. Olson time zone database 
> support is just one part of a larger package of various pieces of 
> public domain code. The package was written from scratch in C# and 
> includes an objectified form of the olson time zone database (because 
> we all know how fun it is to analyze the raw, obfuscated data). I also

> created a variety of unit and regression tests.
>
> The implementation used to be quite experimental, but now it has gone 
> through a bit of usage and appears to be getting quite solid. I also 
> wrote an article on codeproject discussing a simple use case of using 
> the package 
> (http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Using_time_zones_in_NET.asp).
>
> I would appreciate it if you included a description of this package 
> for those that use .NET, including C#, VB.NET, etc. on the Olson Time 
> zone database home page (http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm) -- 
> using some form of less verbose description than mine above :-).
>
> Thanks!
> Kevin
>
>
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