Hi Phillip, There is no need to apologize, I completely understand your point of view, and I'm sure it is shared by many.
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.
Perhaps this is where some of our disagreements stem from. I was not advocating this implementation to be the .NET standard for Olson TZ information. I did not even know that any implementations were blessed as such. I had assumed that the main Olson tz information page was a reference page, and I was simply suggesting that adding a .NET reference would be incredibly valuable (since there is no such reference). I certainly wouldn't want mine to be the "standard" because I simply don't know if it is that up-to-par :-) Now, I think there is a very important discussion to be had about when a particular implementation is "stable" enough to be recommended. Take for example your situation in searching for a .NET olson timezone implementation: You had to search Google, newsgroups, MSDN, etc. I'm not sure what solution you came to, but I'm sure the first place you looked was http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm. You would have seen that the Olson time zone database is aware of a plethora of implementations, but none for .NET, and then would begin the complex search of finding functionality and knowing it works. I believe that this is a difficult hunt in the .NET world (at least when I did my full hunt before I created the package). It would be interesting if Olson had a suite of regression tests it could run on packages and bless them as valid implementations of the Olson time zone database. Perhaps it is a different section of the page or a link from the main page, but I think the current model of DIY or interpreting message group banter/trolling/lack of info is a hard one.
Other's have provided solutions, and though difficult to find, they are out there.
Just out of curiosity, what are some of the other .NET solutions?
Now, admittedly, I do prefer to insall classes that have pretty much a similar functions as opposed to those that incororate extra features.
Full time zone support in PublicDomain is available in 3 .cs files (which can be combined into one), and namespaces changed. Perhaps I could do this as a side project. The classes are there just not the packaging.
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.
I completely agree. I used to worked at Microsoft and my informed guess is that they won't be switching any time soon because the demand is just not there. A large majority of Microsoft customers are siloed with ASP.NET/Windows/MS SQL/etc, and don't require interoperation. Until that changes, MS won't change their implementation... Thanks, Kevin