DateTimeOffset Is The New DateTime

Justin Van Patten neatly summarises the new DateTimeOffset class introduced in .NET 3.5. In short, this new class combines the year, month, blah, blah, second storage of the DateTime with a time zone offset. The most important point to take from Justin's article is that apart from a few exceptions (which he describes), you should always use DateTimeOffset in new code instead of the old DateTime.

Naturally there will continue to be situations where you need to pass a DateTime but the DateTimeOffset will always be able to scale back to suit. It is much harder to infer time zone information from a DateTime to provide a DateTimeOffset. I'd love to see the SQL Server team introduce this data type concept to databases.