Microsoft's Bing Maps has announced that the Bing Maps Time Zone API is generally available. The API is a set of REST APIs designed to cover a variety of scenarios developers often deal with when it comes to time zones. Among the capabilities of the Bing Maps Time Zone API are find a time zone, convert to local time, and list time zones.
The API returns the local time zone and daylight savings (DST) information for a given place name or pair of coordinates. The API will provide a list of time zones if the location given has more than one time zone. The API doesn’t require latitude and longitude as input in order to find a time zone. So, developers don’t have to go through an additional step of getting the geographical coordinates of a location in order for the API to return the time zone information. When the API is provided a place name like “San Francisco, CA,” it returns the corresponding time zone information.
The Bing Maps Time Zone API features time zone conversion. When the API is given a UTC datetime value and a time zone to target, it will return the local time for the targeted time zone. The API also returns a list of time zones. When the API is given a time zone ID (in Microsoft Windows or IANA time zone standards), it will return a complete list of time zone information which includes the generic name of the time zone, abbreviation, utcOffset, and time zone IDs (Windows and IANA).
For more information about the Bing Maps Time Zone API, check out the API documentation.