Deprecation of time zone entities in Common Data Service
The internal time zone service in Common Data Service is being deprecated in favor of the Windows API for all time zone calculations. This means that we are restructuring the time zone entities in Common Data Service and changing the way things work.
Deprecating the TimeZoneRule entity
The TimeZoneRule entity contains the Bias and daylight savings time (DST) information for converting between local time and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), for a particular time zone, at a particular period in time. This feature is being deprecated in the near future. If you are using this entity for any client-side calculations, we recommend you to instead use LocalTimeFromUtcTime/UtcTimeFromLocalTime functions from the time zone definition entity, or TimeZoneInfo from .NET.
Deprecating TimeZoneDefinition attributes
The TimeZoneDefinition continues to represent time zones in Common Data Service, but we are ending the support for certain properties.
- Bias, which used to store the offset between a time zone and UTC
- RetiredOrder, which indicates whether a time zone definition is retired, will also be deprecated because we will no longer store retired time zone definitions.
Other properties and operations will still function as usual.
Dealing with time zone and DST changes
Common Data Service used to ship changes to time zones and DST as database upgrades. Going forward, Microsoft Windows will ship these changes as Windows updates to our servers; no action will be needed on the client end for the changes to be available. More information: Microsoft policy in response to daylight saving time and time zone change.
