Description:
According to the changelog of Connector/NET 6.6.4 (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/connector-net/en/connector-net-news-6-6-4.html), Connector/NET will create DateTime objects as Kind=UTC if the reported timezone offset is +0:00 (time_zone property is utc). Otherwise, it reports Kind=Local.
Using EntityFramework 6.x with Connector/NET 6.8.3 or 6.9.5 (haven't tested this with any versions in between) appears to erroneously report timestamps as Kind=UTC when the timezone offset is not UTC (-6:00 in my case).
The MySQL server version is 5.6.12, tables are InnoDB, and the server OS is OSX 10.6. The Connector/NET is being used on a Windows 8 machine in a .NET 4.5 project (MVC5+WebAPI2). It was installed in the project via NuGet.
How to repeat:
Let "var context" be an Entity Framework 6.x context.
Let there be a table with the following definition called 'records'. It is represented on the Entity Framework 6.x context as "DbSet<record> records".
+-----------+-------------+------+-----+-------------------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+-------------+------+-----+-------------------+----------------+
| id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| timestamp | varchar(20) | YES | | CURRENT_TIMESTAMP | |
+-----------+-------------+------+-----+-------------------+----------------+
Let the server timezone be listed as America/Denver and the separate web server also have that same timezone. Assume the clocks are in sync.
Execute the following to establish that the offset is not +0:00:
var tz = context.Database.SqlQuery<string>("SELECT TIMEDIFF( CURTIME(), UTC_TIME() )").FirstOrDefault();
tz will contain "-06:00:00".
Assume the time is 13:00:00 MDT(-6:00). Execute the following:
var r = new record() { };
context.records.Add(r);
context.SaveChanges(); //r.timestamp now contains {3/11/2015 1:00:00 PM}, Kind=UTC
At this point, "r.timestamp" is wrong. Since it contains 1PM with Kind=UTC, it will be serialized to "2015-03-11T13:00:00Z" per ISO 8601. When this is parsed by something such as momentjs, it will be parsed as if it were 1PM GMT and converted into the "local" time, resulting in a time of "2015/03/11 07:00:00" for -6:00.
This same behavior would also be seen if we executed the following:
var rec = context.records.FirstOrDefault();
"rec.timestamp" will contain a DateTime with the Date and Time properties set to the local (-6:00 converted) time, but the Kind=UTC.
