I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.

Time Zones in Windows
Posted by Rod in Old-blog-archives at 2:45 pm on Monday, 19 September 2005

We’re building an application that requires displaying times in various countries. The problem is displaying the time correctly with Daylight saving etc.  We looked at WebServices but then found this example which shows that all times, including daylight savings info, are in the Registry.

World Clock and the TimeZoneInformation class

Windows NT’s time zone database is stored in the registry, at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones. Under this key are subkeys describing each time zone. Each subkey has the following values (examples taken from the GMT Standard Time key):

Value Type Purpose Example
Display REG_SZ Display name (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time: Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London
Dlt REG_SZ Name for zone during Daylight Savings GMT Daylight Time
Index REG_DWORD Unique index number for zone 85
MapID REG_SZ Unknown. May be related to Win95 clickable time zone map. 0,1
Std REG_SZ Name for zone outside Daylight Savings GMT Standard Time
TZI REG_BINARY Offsets and savings start/end date
Trackback uri |