Baltimore Consulting

I came across a situation where I needed to convert a string into RTF format dynamically in an application. After some searching for a .NET RTF library or a conversion function, I decided to just implement my own find/replace method. Needless to say, this proved to be rather tricky. An then, the ah ha moment… I got a tip from a colleague to use the WinForms RichTextBox control and let it do the work. After a little testing, it seems to work pretty well so I figured I’d share this snippet if you ever have the same issue.

private static string FormatAsRTF(string DirtyText)
{
	System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox rtf = new System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox();
	rtf.Text = DirtyText;
	return rtf.Rtf;
}

Just wanted to share a quick utility function. We have a server in another timezone and this frequently presents issues in our client apps when displaying time stamps. There isn’t really a solid solution to handle this in the database so I put together this little utility function that can be called rather than DateTime.Now to get the current local time.

public static DateTime CurrentDateTime()
{
   return TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(DateTime.Now,
                       TimeZoneInfo.Local),
                       TimeZoneInfo.Utc,
                       TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time"));
}

I have this in a utility class called AppLogic so all I need to do is call AppLogic.CurrentDateTime() to get the local EST time. Obviously, you would change your time zone where applicable.

Enjoy!