TimeZone represents a time zone, primarily used for configuring a Java.Util.Calendar or Java.Text.SimpleDateFormat instance.

Most applications will use TimeZone.Default which returns a TimeZone based on the time zone where the program is running.

You can also get a specific TimeZoneTimeZone.GetTimeZone(string).

It is highly unlikely you'll ever want to use anything but the factory methods yourself. Let classes like Java.Util.Calendar and Java.Text.SimpleDateFormat do the date computations for you.

If you do need to do date computations manually, there are two common cases to take into account:

• Somewhere like California, where daylight time is used. The TimeZone.UseDaylightTime method will always return true, and TimeZone.InDaylightTime(Date) must be used to determine whether or not daylight time applies to a given Date. The TimeZone.RawOffset method will return a raw offset of (in this case) -8 hours from UTC, which isn't usually very useful. More usefully, the TimeZone.GetOffset(int, System.Int32, System.Int32, System.Int32, System.Int32, System.Int32) methods return the actual offset from UTC for a given point in time; this is the raw offset plus (if the point in time is TimeZone.InDaylightTime(Date)) the applicable TimeZone.DSTSavings (usually, but not necessarily, 1 hour).
• Somewhere like Japan, where daylight time is not used. The TimeZone.UseDaylightTime and TimeZone.InDaylightTime(Date) methods both always return false, and the raw and actual offsets will always be the same.

Note the type returned by the factory methods TimeZone.Default and TimeZone.GetTimeZone(string) is implementation dependent. This may introduce serialization incompatibility issues between different implementations, or different versions of Android.

See Also

• Java.Util.Calendar
• Java.Util.GregorianCalendar
• Java.Text.SimpleDateFormat

[Android Documentation]