TimeZoneInfo in .NET Core when hosting on unix (nginx)

Question

For example, when I try to do the following.

TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(\"Central European Standard Time\")

I get the error, that

Answer 1

.Net Core using system timezone. Unfortunately Windows and Linux have different timezone system. Now you have two ways:

• Use other (and universal) impementation of timezone like Noda time
• Translate between Windows and IANA time zones, e.g. using the TimeZoneConverter micro-library.

Answer 2

If you want to try a Windows time zone and then fallback on a IANA one if the Windows one doesn't exist:

var tzi  = TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones().Any(x => x.Id == "Eastern Standard Time") ? 
    TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time") : 
    TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("America/New_York");

Answer 3

I was able to support this use-case in my development docker image by doing the following:

cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles "/usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific Standard Time"

Obviously, I don't think that would be a good idea for production deployments. But it might help in some scenarios.

Answer 4

Working of off the previous answer, we can avoid the expensive try/catch by checking which OS we're running on:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

TimeZoneInfo easternStandardTime;
if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Windows))
{
  easternStandardTime = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
}
if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Linux))
{
  easternStandardTime = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("America/New_York");
}
if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.OSX))
{
  throw new NotImplementedException("I don't know how to do a lookup on a Mac.");
}

Answer 5

Can you please try this?

   TimeZoneInfo easternZone;
        try
        {
            easternZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
        }
        catch (TimeZoneNotFoundException)
        {
            easternZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("America/New_York");
        }

You can review the list of IANA time zones here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones