CRM 2011, Date in plugin and DST - c#

I have one issue which I resolved by myself but yet need some confirming words whether I am 100% correct on my thought, just because there is not any documentation I found to prove myself correct.
My server is in DST time currently, CRM UI is also showing 1 hour up then data stored in db. that's fine.
When I calculate and store date with plugin, after my plugin update operation finishes, CRM platform deducts 1 hour from data I saved. I have read that when we do some operation via SDK related date time, CRM stores date time as it is. is it the case that when time is in DST, platform also get involves to deduct 1 hour by then ?
As a resolution, I have commented out my line of deducting 1 hour and letting CRM to do it now.
Am I correct on my understanding or it would be appreciable if some one can provide any documentation URL.

Any time you're working in the SDK, DateTimes are retrieved and stored as UTC. The CRM web platform will convert the UTC time into the user's time. You shouldn't need to be doing any Conversions of time, just using UTC.
Let's assume your local time is UTC -1 (with DST since UTC doesn't observe it). So if UTC is 14:00, your local time is 13:00.
Let's also assume your plugin in going to populate a date attribute on the entity that is for the current time, tomorrow. If your code looks like this:
entity.new_SomeDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);
service.Update(entity);
Assuming DateTime.Now is 13:00, it'll store 13:00 in the database (as if it was UTC). Then when you go to look at the time value from the CRM website, since you're UTC - 1 it'll display 12:00, even though you wanted 13:00.
Now if your code looks like this:
entity.new_SomeDate = DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(1);
service.Update(entity);
Assuming DateTime.Now is 13:00, it'll store 14:00 in the database since DateTime.UtcNow is 14:00. Then when you go to look at the time value from the CRM website, since you're UTC - 1 it'll display 13:00, since it'll take the UTC value - 1.
Now if your code looks like this:
entity.new_SomeDate = entity.new_UserEnteredDateFromCrm.AddDays(1);
service.Update(entity);
The new_UserEnteredDateFromCrm will already have been converted from the users' Time Zone to UTC and it'll work as expected.
This makes DateTimes that you would prefer to store as Dates very difficult though (birthdays anyone?) and you may have to think through it a little more in depth.

I've figured it out myself. that date has component in it which explores what kind of date time is it in. it can be either Utc, Local or Unspecified.
when you pass any date to CRM attribute via code. make sure that date time kind is Utc, otherwise CRM service internal operation will convert it to be into Utc.
In my case, I was stucked to this because when I read date from CRM, I had to set office start in that date. e.g. I needed to make 03/02/2014 12:00 to 03/02/2014 8:30 to make incoming date aligned with office start time. I was doing operation like,
DateTime InDate = Case.CreatedOn.Value;
DateTime Dt = new DateTime(InDate.Year,InDate.Month,InDate.Day,8,30,0)
Having InDate in Utc Time, I was creating new date object so it lost DateTime kind from Utc to Local ( having in DST it signifies to be 1 hour up)
to avoid, always set DateTime kind to be exactly as provided In date to new object. e.g. above operation can be done alternatively like.
DateTime InDate = Case.CreatedOn.Value;
DateTime Dt = new DateTime(InDate.Year,InDate.Month,InDate.Day,8,30,0)
Dt = DateTime.SpecifyKind(Dt,DateTimeKind.Utc)
Hope that Helps.

Related

Is there functionality to convert from UTC time to local time using country name? [duplicate]

We are developing a C# application for a web-service client. This will run on Windows XP PC's.
One of the fields returned by the web service is a DateTime field. The server returns a field in GMT format i.e. with a "Z" at the end.
However, we found that .NET seems to do some kind of implicit conversion and the time was always 12 hours out.
The following code sample resolves this to some extent in that the 12 hour difference has gone but it makes no allowance for NZ daylight saving.
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("en-NZ");
string date = "Web service date".ToString("R", ci);
DateTime convertedDate = DateTime.Parse(date);
As per this date site:
UTC/GMT Offset
Standard time zone: UTC/GMT +12 hours
Daylight saving time: +1 hour
Current time zone offset: UTC/GMT +13 hours
How do we adjust for the extra hour? Can this be done programmatically or is this some kind of setting on the PC's?
For strings such as 2012-09-19 01:27:30.000, DateTime.Parse cannot tell what time zone the date and time are from.
DateTime has a Kind property, which can have one of three time zone options:
Unspecified
Local
Utc
NOTE If you are wishing to represent a date/time other than UTC or your local time zone, then you should use DateTimeOffset.
So for the code in your question:
DateTime convertedDate = DateTime.Parse(dateStr);
var kind = convertedDate.Kind; // will equal DateTimeKind.Unspecified
You say you know what kind it is, so tell it.
DateTime convertedDate = DateTime.SpecifyKind(
DateTime.Parse(dateStr),
DateTimeKind.Utc);
var kind = convertedDate.Kind; // will equal DateTimeKind.Utc
Now, once the system knows its in UTC time, you can just call ToLocalTime:
DateTime dt = convertedDate.ToLocalTime();
This will give you the result you require.
I'd look into using the System.TimeZoneInfo class if you are in .NET 3.5. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezoneinfo.aspx. This should take into account the daylight savings changes correctly.
// Coordinated Universal Time string from
// DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u");
string date = "2009-02-25 16:13:00Z";
// Local .NET timeZone.
DateTime localDateTime = DateTime.Parse(date);
DateTime utcDateTime = localDateTime.ToUniversalTime();
// ID from:
// "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zone"
// See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezoneinfo.id.aspx
string nzTimeZoneKey = "New Zealand Standard Time";
TimeZoneInfo nzTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(nzTimeZoneKey);
DateTime nzDateTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUtc(utcDateTime, nzTimeZone);
TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(date);
DateTime objects have the Kind of Unspecified by default, which for the purposes of ToLocalTime is assumed to be UTC.
To get the local time of an Unspecified DateTime object, you therefore just need to do this:
convertedDate.ToLocalTime();
The step of changing the Kind of the DateTime from Unspecified to UTC is unnecessary. Unspecified is assumed to be UTC for the purposes of ToLocalTime: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.tolocaltime.aspx
I know this is an older question, but I ran into a similar situation, and I wanted to share what I had found for future searchers, possibly including myself :).
DateTime.Parse() can be tricky -- see here for example.
If the DateTime is coming from a Web service or some other source with a known format, you might want to consider something like
DateTime.ParseExact(dateString,
"MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss",
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal | DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal)
or, even better,
DateTime.TryParseExact(...)
The AssumeUniversal flag tells the parser that the date/time is already UTC; the combination of AssumeUniversal and AdjustToUniversal tells it not to convert the result to "local" time, which it will try to do by default. (I personally try to deal exclusively with UTC in the business / application / service layer(s) anyway. But bypassing the conversion to local time also speeds things up -- by 50% or more in my tests, see below.)
Here's what we were doing before:
DateTime.Parse(dateString, new CultureInfo("en-US"))
We had profiled the app and found that the DateTime.Parse represented a significant percentage of CPU usage. (Incidentally, the CultureInfo constructor was not a significant contributor to CPU usage.)
So I set up a console app to parse a date/time string 10000 times in a variety of ways. Bottom line:
Parse() 10 sec
ParseExact() (converting to local) 20-45 ms
ParseExact() (not converting to local) 10-15 ms
... and yes, the results for Parse() are in seconds, whereas the others are in milliseconds.
I'd just like to add a general note of caution.
If all you are doing is getting the current time from the computer's internal clock to put a date/time on the display or a report, then all is well. But if you are saving the date/time information for later reference or are computing date/times, beware!
Let's say you determine that a cruise ship arrived in Honolulu on 20 Dec 2007 at 15:00 UTC. And you want to know what local time that was.
1. There are probably at least three 'locals' involved. Local may mean Honolulu, or it may mean where your computer is located, or it may mean the location where your customer is located.
2. If you use the built-in functions to do the conversion, it will probably be wrong. This is because daylight savings time is (probably) currently in effect on your computer, but was NOT in effect in December. But Windows does not know this... all it has is one flag to determine if daylight savings time is currently in effect. And if it is currently in effect, then it will happily add an hour even to a date in December.
3. Daylight savings time is implemented differently (or not at all) in various political subdivisions. Don't think that just because your country changes on a specific date, that other countries will too.
#TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUtc(timeUtc, TimeZoneInfo.Local)
Don't forget if you already have a DateTime object and are not sure if it's UTC or Local, it's easy enough to use the methods on the object directly:
DateTime convertedDate = DateTime.Parse(date);
DateTime localDate = convertedDate.ToLocalTime();
How do we adjust for the extra hour?
Unless specified .net will use the local pc settings. I'd have a read of: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.daylighttime.aspx
By the looks the code might look something like:
DaylightTime daylight = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.GetDaylightChanges( year );
And as mentioned above double check what timezone setting your server is on. There are articles on the net for how to safely affect the changes in IIS.
In answer to Dana's suggestion:
The code sample now looks like:
string date = "Web service date"..ToString("R", ci);
DateTime convertedDate = DateTime.Parse(date);
DateTime dt = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(convertedDate);
The original date was 20/08/08; the kind was UTC.
Both "convertedDate" and "dt" are the same:
21/08/08 10:00:26; the kind was local
I had the problem with it being in a data set being pushed across the wire (webservice to client) that it would automatically change because the DataColumn's DateType field was set to local. Make sure you check what the DateType is if your pushing DataSets across.
If you don't want it to change, set it to Unspecified
I came across this question as I was having a problem with the UTC dates you get back through the twitter API (created_at field on a status); I need to convert them to DateTime. None of the answers/ code samples in the answers on this page were sufficient to stop me getting a "String was not recognized as a valid DateTime" error (but it's the closest I have got to finding the correct answer on SO)
Posting this link here in case this helps someone else - the answer I needed was found on this blog post: http://www.wduffy.co.uk/blog/parsing-dates-when-aspnets-datetimeparse-doesnt-work/ - basically use DateTime.ParseExact with a format string instead of DateTime.Parse
This code block uses universal time to convert current DateTime object then converts it back to local DateTime. Works perfect for me I hope it helps!
CreatedDate.ToUniversalTime().ToLocalTime();

Comparing time regardless of date

I have an object that has properties currently as DateTime.
The object is marked as valid within a time frame. The default being 00:00:00 to 23:59:59
The user enters the value in the UI and the property is set via:
new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year,
DateTime.Now.Month,
DateTime.Now.Day,
model.Hours,
model.Minutes,
model.Seconds)
This is then converted to UTC when it hits the database.
Today's date is 29th August 2013. If a colleague in India runs this program it will store the data in the database as 28th August 2013 18:30:00 as they are 5.5 hours ahead of UTC so 29th August 2013 00:00:00 becomes yesterday.
When the logic tries to determine if the object is valid the logic is:
if (DateTime.UtcNow.TimeOfDay > model.MyPropertyFromDB.TimeOfDay)
We are trying to determine if the current time is within a range of 00:00:00 and 23:59:59
This fails as 14:00 (current time) is not greater than 18:30
What would be the best approach to compare just times?
Would storing the values as DateTimeOffSet help, is using ToLocal() ok?
Other considerations are that a user in India is using the app which is hosted in the UK so it needs to be timezone aware.
Thanks
Like others, I'm still unclear on exactly what you are wanting. But clearly, you shouldn't do this:
new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year,
DateTime.Now.Month,
DateTime.Now.Day,
model.Hours,
model.Minutes,
model.Seconds)
That would be much better as:
DateTime.Today.Add(new TimeSpan(model.Hours, model.Minutes, model.Seconds))
But why are you doing this to begin with? Either of these would give you back the local date. I assume this is going to run on a server, so do you really want the time zone of the server to influence this result? Probably not. Please read: The Case Against DateTime.Now.
If you wanted the UTC date, you could do this:
DateTime.UtcNow.Date.Add(new TimeSpan(model.Hours, model.Minutes, model.Seconds))
That would at least be universally the same regardless of your server's time zone. But still, I don't think this is what you are after.
What's not clear is why is the user only entering the time while you are assigning the current date. If the date is relevant, then shouldn't the user enter it and it would be part of your model?
If the date is not relevant, then why are you storing it? You can use a TimeSpan type for the time value internally. You didn't say what your database is, but let's just guess that it is SQL Server, in which case you could use the time type on the field in the table.
I suppose it's possible that the date is relevant, but you want to control it, while the user takes control of providing the time. If that's the case, then you must know the time zone of the user (or the time zone of whatever the context is if it's not the user). Assuming you had a Windows time zone identifier (see the timezone tag wiki), then you could do something like this:
var tz = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(theTimeZoneId);
var local = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUtc(DateTime.UtcNow, tz);
var dt = local.Date.Add(new TimeSpan(model.Hours, model.Minutes, model.Seconds));
If you don't have the time zone information, then this wouldn't be possible to solve.
As general advice, you might want to try using Noda Time instead of the built-in stuff. It's much better at helping you figure out this sort of thing. From the main page:
Noda Time is an alternative date and time API for .NET. It helps you to think about your data more clearly, and express operations on that data more precisely.
That appears to be directly the problem you are having here. If you want to clarify some of the questions I asked, I'd be happy to edit my answer and show you exactly how to do this with Noda Time.
Why your question is confusing
We are trying to determine if the current time is within a range of 00:00:00 and 23:59:59
All times are within that range. Well, maybe a value like 23:59:59.1 would be outside of it, but you aren't collecting fractional seconds in your model, so that's irrelevant. But why would you need to validate that? Maybe you are just trying to avoid numbers that aren't valid times at all? Like 99:99:99?
This fails as 14:00 (current time) is not greater than 18:30
Wait - you didn't say anything about comparing one time greater than another. 14:00 and 18:30 are both still in the range you specified.
What would be the best approach to compare just times?
Hard to answer. Are they both UTC times? Is one UTC and one is local? Are they both local? Do you know the time zone of the local times? Are you prepared to deal with ambiguous or invalid local times do to daylight saving time transitions?
Would storing the values as DateTimeOffSet help?
Perhaps, but you haven't given me enough information. It would help only if the date portion is relevant and the you get the correct offsets.
is using ToLocal() ok?
I would argue that no, it's not ok. Local in this context will give you the time zone of the server, which you probably don't want to introduce into your business logic.
So if I understand this correctly you have a time saved in UTC in the database and you are trying to determine whether it falls within a particular time frame? I'm not sure if you want the time frame in local time or UTC so here are both:
DateTime dbTime = model.MyPropertyFromDB;
TimeSpan minTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0);
TimeSpan maxTime = new TimeSpan(23, 59, 59);
if (dbTime.TimeOfDay > minTime && dbTime.TimeOfDay < maxTime)
{
//Within time range (UTC)
}
if (dbTime.ToLocalTime().TimeOfDay > minTime && dbTime.ToLocalTime().TimeOfDay < maxTime)
{
//Within time range (local)
}
Edit: If you want to compare Now to a start and end time from an object in database:
TimeSpan now = DateTime.UtcNow.TimeOfDay;
TimeSpan startDate = model.startDate.TimeOfDay;
TimeSpan endDate = model.endDate.TimeOfDay;
if (now > startDate && now < endDate)
{
//Within time range (UTC)
}
I would say that the methodology being used here is fundamentally flawed and that you need to take a different approach.
new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, // Server date
DateTime.Now.Month,
DateTime.Now.Day,
model.Hours, // Local time
model.Minutes,
model.Seconds)
I can't see a way of 'normalising' the input in this way, unless you have a way of reliably knowing exactly which timezone a user is in. Simply, there's no easy way to turn a date built in this way into UTC.
My first question to you is, how is the model being passed from client to server? If you're using javascript/ajax then the solution should be fairly straightforward to solve by constructing the datetime object on the client (which will include their timezone data) and then rely on the browser to convert it to UTC for transit.
If you are using Razor\MVC then you can achieve a similar thing with forms encoding, except that you will need to call ToUTC on the server as the browser won't automatically fix the date for you for this media format.
Both methods require that you build a full datetime object on the client and then submit it, rather than trying to build it from seconds, minutes, hours on the server. You don't need to expose all this to the client of course, as long as the datetime is fully formed at the point of submission.
Once you've got a nice UTC datetime, you can extract just the time if you don't need the rest of it.
Hope this helps.
Pete

Why is it so hard to convert from one time zone to another?

I have read through multiple posts here until my head was ready to explode with little lines on the atlas strewn all over.
Here is what I wanted to do:
I have a calendar full of appointments to display for a business.
The business is in New York (EDT)
My dev machine is in PST
Production Servers are in California (PST)
Calendar data is stored in the DB in UTC
All I want to do is take a time range specified in EDT (say May 15, 9am - 5pm) and show all the appointments on the calendar.
So, my calendar control tells me "I want the appointments from 5/15/12 9am EDT - 5/15/12 5pm EDT"
I say fine, I will call a db proc and pass the date values in UTC, ie (5/15/12 13:00 UTC - 5/15/12 21:00 UTC). Then when I get them, I will convert them back to EDT before handing them to you.
However, Little did I know that .NET will find this simple task to trip me up.
I got the TimeZoneInfo just fine by using:
TimeZoneInfo zoneInfo = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time")
But that is as far as things worked.
Here's what I tried next:
DateTime rangeStartUTC = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(rangeStart, zoneInfo);
EXCEPTION: Kind is not properly specified.
(WTF is Kind?) I told you the time I want to convert, I told you it is in EDT, I told you I want to convert it to UTC. What more do you want? I could do it by hand. F**ing do it already.
So I tried to set the Kind, but it only has two values! Local or Utc. But my time is neither local, nor Utc. Why in the hell are you asking me for a time zone info then? Cant you just tell what the local time zone is by asking the system clock? Predictably, neither worked. (yeah, according to the docs there is UnSpecified, but again according to the docs, it doesn't really do anything and yes I tried that one too).
Then, I tried:
TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(rangeStart, zoneInfo, TimeZoneInfo.Utc)
SAME LAME EXCUSE!
Time to read some more of St. Jon Skeet's passages.
What do you know, there is a new class DateTimeOffset. It will solve all your problems.
God bless for all the nice and merciful .NET 4.0 bounties...
DateTimeOffset offStartTime = new DateTimeOffset(rangeStart, zone.GetUtcOffset(rangeStart));
rangeStartUTC = offStartTime.UtcDateTime;
EXCEPTION: "Offset should be 0 for Utc dates"
Gaaaaah!
How the heck did you conclude that the rangeStart is Utc? Did I ever tell you that?
A bunch of people are quoting
TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(rangeStart, zone) as the solution, how is it "Kind" enough to work for them? Unless their source time zone conveniently happens to be the same as their local time zone.
So what is a poor .NET C# developer to do?
Try DateTime.SpecifyKind(rangeStart, DateTimeKind.Unspecified) before DateTimeOffset or TimeZoneInfo. It should not do any conversion of the time itself, just change the Kind.
As I understand it, the Kind on DateTime should be either Unspecified or correspond to the result of private TimeZoneInfo.GetCorrespondingKind() method, which returns Local for
TimeZoneInfo.Local and Utc for TimeZoneInfo.Utc.
UPDATE: Sorry, get the original answer wrong, should be all good now.

How to convert Datetimes into UTC based timing values to compare timings- C#

I've string (variable is fileDate) with Date values in the following format:
2/12/2011 11:58 AM
Now I want to convert this to a date and then to UTC time based as I've problems in comparing dates in different machines, so *I always want to convert all strings (which are getting compared) to Utc_date values.*
I tried this code below but it did not work as I'm not able to convert the above string to Datetime based (as it does not have seconds).
DateTime date = Convert.ToDateTime(fileDate);
date = DateTime.SpecifyKind(date, DateTimeKind.Utc);
fileDate = date.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt");
Above did not work showing FormatException.
Can you pl help?
To start with, I'd suggest using DateTime.ParseExact or TryParseExact - it's not clear to me whether your sample is meant to be December 2nd or February 12th. Specifying the format may well remove your FormatException.
The next problem is working out which time zone you want to convert it with - are you saying that 11:58 is a local time in some time zone, or it's already a UTC time?
If it's a local time in the time zone of the code which is running this, you can use DateTimeStyles.AssumeLocal | DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal to do it as part of parsing.
If it's already a universal time, use DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal
If it's a local time in a different time zone, you'll need to use TimeZoneInfo to perform the conversion.
Also, if it's a local time you'll need to consider two corner cases (assuming you're using a time zone which observes daylight saving time):
A local time may be skipped due to DST transitions, when the clocks go forward. So if the clocks skip from 1am to 2am, then 1:30am doesn't exist at all.
A local time may be ambiguous due to DST transitions, when the clocks go back. So if the clocks go back from 2am to 1am, then 1:30am occurs twice at different UTC times - which occurrence are you interested in?
You should decide how you want to handle these cases, and make sure they're covered in your unit tests.
Another option is to use my date and time library, Noda Time, which separates the concepts of "local date/time" and "date/time in a particular time zone" (and others) more explicitly.
you should be using DateTime.ParseExact to get the value into a proper DateTime instance, and then you can use .ToUniversalTime() to get the UTC time (this would be with respect to the difference of time as in your server machine)
you can use :
DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime();
i don't mean to say to you should use "DateTime.Now" but you get the point that as a part of the DateTime object you have a method to transform it to Universal time
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.touniversaltime.aspx

How to store my dates?

I don't have much experience with Utc Dates, but from what I know, they are in most cases the best way to store dates.
But I'm currently working on a program and I'm in doubt what will be the best way to store my dates. In the program, a user can follow a course for five weeks, starting on the day of registration. Every day he has to fill in a form, which is saved for that day.
Currently, I'm saving the StartDate and EndDate of the course as DateTime (no Utc) Should I save this as Utc, or isn't it necessary? Because I only need the day (if the user registers on February 8th at 10:04, all the system needs to know is that February 8th is the first day of the course. Is there maybe a better way to store this information? And what would be the best way to save system-event-dates (like user logged in, account created, etc)?
I used to store the form-data also with a DateTime, to calculate on which day it was submitted, but I changed it so it only saves the relative day-number (e.g. day 5).
Btw, I'm using C# and a SQL Server database.
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) has to do with the time component of a date. It's a standard way to store DateTimes so that you can compare without worrying about timezones.
If all you are worried about is the Date Component & Timezone/Location is unimportant you could just store it in the database as 2012-02-01 00:00:00
You can get the date only component in .NET using
System.DateTime.Today;
Alternatively if you're working with some other Date...
DateTime dt = DateTime.Now;
dt.Date; // <--- this will give the Date Component with the Time stripped back to 00:00:00
Why don't you just store the dates in a DATE database column, and not worry about time zones at all?
Generally you want to store in UTC if there is a functional requirement for your system to be able to work with users in different timezones.
Let's say you have a user in Hong Kong and a user in Sydney looking at the same event. If you want them both see the event date (and time) in their timezones, then here we are, you will probably need to store it in UTC and then present to users respecting their geo locations.
If you don't have such requirements, you don't do such conversions and you only assume one timezone then you don't need to add more complexity into your system, just use Date column and store the current date there.
But if you do - go for UTC. In this scenario you will need DateTime, not just Date. This is because 21:30 in one timezone can be 2:30 next day in another timezone so time really matters.
When showing to a user you may convert it to the user's timezone and then throw time away, but in order to make the conversion correct you will need to keep time.
It is easy to work with UTC in .NET, DateTime has .ToUniversalTime() method that converts a datetime value to UTC for you:
var utcNow = DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime();
there is also a property:
var utcNow = DateTime.UtcNow;
EDITED
Use TimeZoneInfo static class to convert datetimes from/to timezones you need (for example from UTC to the specified user's timezone:
TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(...)
TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUtc(...)

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