Chapter Eleven. General Software Issues

ALTHOUGH THESE TOPICS may take Windows as their starting point, they are nonetheless applicable to software development in general. We start with the insanity of time zone, then explore some simple software engineering principles, and end with topics related to performance.

Why daylight saving time is nonintuitive

A COMMON COMPLAINT is that all the Win32 time zone conversion functions such as FileTimeToLocalFileTime apply the current daylight saving time (DST) bias rather than the bias that was in effect at the time in question. (Outside North America, daylight saving time is typically called summer time.)

For example, suppose you have a FILETIME structure that represents 1 January 2000 12:00AM. If you ...

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