Get DateTime For Another Time Zone Regardless of Local Time Zone

Regardless of what the user's local time zone is set to, using C# (.NET 2.0) I need to determine the time (DateTime object) in the Eastern time zone.

I know about these methods but there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to get a DateTime object for a different time zone than what the user is in.

 DateTime.Now
 DateTime.UtcNow
 TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone

Of course, the solution needs to be daylight savings time aware.

In .NET 3.5, there is TimeZoneInfo, which provides a lot of functionality in this area; 2.0SP1 has DateTimeOffset, but this is much more limited.

Getting UtcNow and adding a fixed offset is part of the job, but isn't DST-aware.

So in 3.5 I think you can do something like:

DateTime eastern = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(
    DateTime.UtcNow, "Eastern Standard Time");

But this simply doesn't exist in 2.0; sorry.

As everyone else mentioned, .NET 2 doesn't contain any time zone information. The information is stored in the registry, though, and its fairly trivial to write a wrapper class around it:

SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\Time Zones

contains sub-keys for all time zones. The TZI field value contains all the transition and bias properties for a time zone, but it's all stuffed in a binary array. The most important bits (bias and daylight), are int32s stored at positions 0 and 8 respectively:

int bias = BitConverter.ToInt32((byte[])tzKey.GetValue("TZI"), 0);
int daylightBias = BitConverter.ToInt32((byte[])tzKey.GetValue("TZI"), 8);

Here's an archive of How to get time zone info (DST) from registry?