"I'm neither micro nor soft" - BG's pick up line

How nice of Microsoft's MSDN team to tell us a couple weeks before it happens that there will be a problem with every program we've written, and if we access the registry, our programs won't access the time zone data correctly....great!

This is the email I received from MS today:
"""
Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,

In 2005, the United States government passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This act changes the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) as of spring 2007. These changes may impact the way applications run. Microsoft is releasing an update for Windows through Microsoft Update that reflects these changes.

Developers who use the .NET Framework may find their applications affected if the application uses the time zone information for historical purposes or if they have derived custom classes from System.TimeZone to provide custom time zone information. The standard System.TimeZone class provides a managed wrapper for the underlying Windows Operating System time zone functions.

In addition, developers who use Visual C++ may find their applications affected if they use the CRT time functions, or the TZ environment variable. Microsoft is currently working on a fix for this issue and will post information about its availability on the Visual Studio Support page.

Most applications that use these affected classes will not need to be modified as this update will ensure that the correct data is provided seamlessly to the application. However, applications that use these classes or the underlying Windows API to perform historical time look-ups will need to be modified.

In most cases, developers who have extended the .NET Framework’s time zone support by creating custom time zone classes derived from System.TimeZone, or by direct access to the Win32 API, will not have to update their applications as long as the available updates to the operating system are applied. However, solutions that rely on private time zone data, or that retrieve system time zone information by accessing the registry directly, may need to be updated. Applications that deal with historical time zone data may also need to be updated.

Microsoft advises all developers who make use of time zone data to test their applications against this update to ensure that their applications function correctly.

For more detailed information and the latest updates please visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb264729.aspx, Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007, and KB928388: 2007 time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Further Assistance

Microsoft values your business. For more information visit http://www.microsoft.com/dst2007, or contact Microsoft for assistance. A list of phone numbers is located at http://support.microsoft.com. Microsoft Premier Customers may engage their Technical Account Manager directly.

Please DO NOT REPLY to this email as this is not a monitored inbox. If you have questions/inquiries please visit http://www.microsoft.com/dst2007

This e-mail is intended for distribution within the United States. Please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary for similar offerings outside the US.

Thank you,

Microsoft US Developer Team
"""

So, if you're using .NET and System.TimeZone (not derived from though!), or Win32 (like me), you're fine....as long as you have the newest version of Windows Vista 2025 Extra Business First class snakesonaplane Superman3 Robocop Titanium edition. Will they provide an update for Windows 2000 or NT Server? What about 2000 Server edition? What about Windows 98? If not, then all of the code I wrote at my old company can be trashed :)...or at least the time zone functionality.

Well, that's it. I'm glad they told us at least before the fact, and late enough so that no one really freaks out like Y2K (why2fake i called it). Idiots.

This is more of a reason to convince my employers to switch to trusty Linux (I'm using a CentOS box at work for CVS, internet web server, and file sharing via SMB).