I have an interesting question folks (well, at least *I* think it's interesting) and I'm wondering if anyone else has run across this issue and if so, how you handled it.

All our access to server-side stuff is done solely through Web Services. Our DataSets are serialized to XML and the XML is passed back and forth between client and server, and serialized back to DataSets. No problems, works fine.

If you've ever looked at the datetime fields in this kind of XML, you'll notice that it contains an offset from UTC (Zulu) time. So, when it gets passed back and forth, the UTC offset gets adjusted accordingly. So even if the client and server are in different time zones, the datetimes should still be stored appropriately in SQL Server.

Our problem occurs when we have datetimes hard-coded server-side (in SQL Server or in server-side C# code). For example, we store a department-wide shift starttime in the database. If that time is 8:00am on the server in the Eastern time zone, well, then people in the Pacific time zone would be starting their shifts at 5:00am ... don't think they'd like that. <g>

So my question boils down to this ... when I call a Web Service method, is there some web server property or something that I can access that tells me which time zone that Web Service method call came from?

TIA,
~~Bonnie