According to multiple postings, Microsoft enabled the ability to use an Application setting - WEBSITE_TIME_ZONE - to control the timezone of the web server.
To try this, I set this value to "Eastern Standard Time" which is my local time zone.
On an ASP.NET MVC Razor page, I added the following code:
DateTime.Now: @DateTime.Now
DateTimeOffset.Now: @DateTimeOffset.Now
DateTime.UtcNow: @DateTimeOffset.UtcNow
when I ran this last night at 5:10:07pm Eastern Standard Time, it gave the following output:
DateTime.Now: 6/18/2015 5:10:07 PM
DateTimeOffset.Now: 6/18/2015 5:10:07 PM +00:00
DateTime.UtcNow: 6/18/2015 9:10:07 PM
As you can see, the setting correctly allowed DateTime.Now to return the correct value in my timezone rather than UTC like Azure Websites/Web Apps usually do. DateTime.UtcNow has always returned the correct value for obvious reasons.
However, DateTimeOffset.Now returns the local time, but with an offset of +00:00 - almost as if the clock was changed rather than the timezone. This occurs even though the documentation says (emphasis mine):
Gets a DateTimeOffset object that is set to the current date and time on the current computer, with the offset set to the local time's offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
So what is happening that the WEBSITE_TIME_ZONE setting impacts DateTime.Now but it does not impact DateTimeOffset.Now? And is there any way I can get around that?
As a point of clarification, I don't really want to change the time zone on the server. We are working on a proper timezone independent solution. But I'm still curious why this happens the way it does.
Well for me it works right now. If it is not working make sure you set right value
So I added to app settings in azure app "WEBSITE_TIME_ZONE: E. Europe Standard Time" and it works.
For those who stumble upon this question. This has been fixed for a long time now.
I am running into the same problem. Unfortunately for me, I inherited a lot of legacy code that was written specifically for Eastern Standard Time, so updating it to work with UTC is essentially not an option.
After digging into the CLR code, it seems to be due to the fact that the local time zone is looked up against the system registry. Don't see how they can properly support this without a change to the CLR code since Azure Web Apps run on shared VMs.
For the time being, I will be getting around this with the following reflection hack at site startup to trick .Net into thinking it is in the Eastern Standard Time. It's not a great solution, and most likely will break if they change the implementation of the TimeZoneInfo class, but hopefully the reason for them changing it will be to address this issue.
// rewrite local timezone
var tz = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
var fInfo = typeof(TimeZoneInfo).GetField("s_cachedData", BindingFlags.Static|BindingFlags.NonPublic);
var cachedData = fInfo.GetValue(null);
fInfo = cachedData.GetType().GetField("m_localTimeZone", BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Public);
fInfo.SetValue(cachedData, tz);