with so much ado about the new energy bill in the US and its implication on the daylight saving time, i felt obliged in pursuing clearity. Ive sparingly been over the term DST of course when setting up a new system and occasionally as it pops up on my computer during march requesting for a command to adjust my time. Ignorant i would say as ive always said yes to the prompt never actually knowing what it was all about.

last year i had a major problem with a software the company i work with developed, its an inventory management software developed for an oil company here in nigeria, i was responsible for the develpoment of the transaction class (an object of class transaction that kept track of transaction details with date and time values), its a requirement that the company be able to track the movement of collected items through out the enterprise. Then came the case of the Cisco Router 600 series delema, the item was missing from the stores, supposedly collected by 10am by one of the ITD staff and entered in the system, the meticulous personnel took note of the time the item was collected on a wall clock on the wall, but the system transaction object refrencing the system clock which has been adjusted by the auto adjust daylight savings time said otherwise, this time 11am.

During routine audit it was found out that the system did not collect enough information to pass the router for audit test, so the router was traced using the transactions report, traced to the personnel that collected the router, the audit guys began to ask questions, the meticulous personnel was adamant the he had collected the router at 10am and not 11, but what the auditors had was the report from the system having his name and employment details as the receiver, to cut the long story short the guy almost lost his job. the audit guys relied on the transaction report because they've used it successfully on various occassion, we did not get any formal system integrity complain since the issue was some how settled but ive been puzzled ever since why the time changed.

i got to know about the DST some weeks back, it occurs at the begining of spring in temperate regions, during this period there are shoter days so the  normal time is increased by an hour to account for the changes, it is said that the change helps in the conservation of electricity supply, so the system time in windows automatically adjusts to the DST setting durring spring about march, april, adding one extra hour to the original sytem time, this setting is a default with windows and has to be disabled to cancel the effect.

As i write this im still yet to develope an WMI script to automatically disable the auto dalight saving time setting accross a network which would be adopted for all our clients(any one with syntax would be invaluable please), such subtle environment bug almost cost someone his job i resent, on the downside i wonder how my company will present the case to our client in question. so i ask was it a programmers fault or som system engineers headache. After all DST is not in effect in this region. hope this doesnt affect my paycheck.

I can tell you it's definitely not a programmers fault. It has to be handled at the environment level. Definitely can't expect the developer to code for that. We do not code for it on this end. I believe during installation windows does ask if you want it to automatically adjust for DST.

I'm in full agreement with Bossman. It's the system administrators job to ensure that the solution is deployed in the correct environment as the developer has no way of knowing where the solution will be displayed. 

In essence, DST is an operating system environmental parameter and as such it's squarely the responsibility of whoever is maintaining the system.

its reinforcing i would say to hear these opinions, and it is true that its not a programmers fault. environment bugs are most often subtle but could have great hits on performance when they become an issue. The case with our client was beautifully settled, and DST has been disabled were applicable throughout the network.