Those of you who are already using Silverlight 1.1 Alpha may have seen that the familiar non-generic collections were all marked as obsolete. This includes almost everything under the System.Collections namespace. You shouldn’t be too surprised. We...

As you know generics were only introduced to the .NET Framework in version 2.0. Originally we had a lot of collections in the System.Collections namespace that can store objects. In version 2.0 we added the System.Collections.Generic namespace to support...

For the .NET 3.5 release, the BCL team has been trying to solve some problems related to dates, times and time zones that customers having been asking us to address for some time. We’ve invested in two significant features: TimeZoneInfo : Extended...

One thing we haven't publicized much on this blog yet is a new date time structure we've added in .NET 3.5 called DateTimeOffset (currently available as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ). Kathy mentioned it on her blog a while back and Daniel...

DateTime. ToUniversalTime converts the value of the current DateTime object to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). When the converted value is either too large or too small to fit into a DateTime object then MaxValue or MinValue is returned, respectively...

System.TimeZoneInfo (currently available as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ) contains methods for checking if a DateTime instance represents an ambiguous or invalid time in a specific time zone. These methods are particularly useful for validating...

The main feature of the System.TimeZoneInfo class (previously named System.TimeZone2 in CTPs prior to .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ) is to enable .NET developers to seamlessly work with Windows time zones in their applications. This includes enabling .NET...