DateTime.kind property

Question

Have a small doubt with the DateTime.kind property. Documentation says that kind property have three fields Unspecified, Local, and Utc to show how the datetime object is represented.

DateTime dt1 = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine(dt1.Kind);

Which shows "Local" but in some microsoft documentation I red that system date and time that Windows maintains is UTC rather than local time.

If that is the case then the above WriteLine should output it as UTC rather than Local?

Any idea?

--Rahul

Answer 1

DateTime.Now is meant to retrieve the current local time. DateTime.UtcNow retrieves the current UTC time.

Note that this is unrelated to how Windows itself stores the time. I believe it stores the current time in UTC, but also keeps track of the current time zone, so it can display the appropriate local time. I believe this is what DateTime.Now does as well.