title: Best practices for DateTime serialization in .NET 3.5
body: <p>Some 4 years back, I followed this <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973825.aspx" rel="noreferrer">MSDN article</a> for DateTime usage best practices for building a .Net client on .Net 1.1 and ASMX web services (with SQL 2000 server as the backend). I still remember the serialization issues I had with DateTime and the testing effort it took for servers in different time zones.</p>
  
  <p>My questions is this: Is there a similar best practices document for some of the new technologies like WCF and SQL server 2008, especially with the addition of new datetime types for storing time zone aware info.</p>
  
  <p>This is the environment:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>SQL server 2008 on Pacific Time.</li>
  <li>Web Services layer on a different time zone.</li>
  <li>Clients could be using .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.5 on different time zones. If it makes it easy, we can force everyone to upgrade to .Net 3.5. :)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Any good suggestions/best practices for the data types to be used in each layer?</p>