This is an issue, as once the BB changes them to midnight-based, and they get synced back to Outlook/Exchange, they show up in Outlook as existing only at 12:00AM on the day of the event. Since the bulk of my calendar time isn't spent looking around the overnight hours, but instead is focused on waking hours activities, so it's rather easy to miss activities.
Armed with Outlook macros, I wanted to try and see what was going on under the covers.
I've written a form and a macro to expose all events that have an Outlook start date of midnight.
I ran into a couple of things really quick:
- Outlook stores its dates in UTC
- My time zone is -5
- I have no record of what an event USED to be
Outlook storing dates
Outlook stores its dates in UTC, Universally Troublesome Conversions. Basically, it's a fancy name for not-your-local-time. Yes, I know what it is really.
That said, you're going to have to get the appointment in UTC, and convert it back to your local time zone. Or, if you're a programmer by nature, you do the math in your head, and hardcode the value in during the R&D phase. That said, instead of looking for events at midnight, I'm now looking for them at 04:00.
My time zone
My time zone is -5. I didn't know, when I began, that Outlook was storing things in UTC, so I hadn't recalled what my time zone UTC differential was.
No record
This is actually what's got me stuck. I have no way of knowing, just from programmatically reviewing an events current properties, if it should be an all day event or not. If I did, then I could write a sync program pretty easily. Since I don't, what we're talking about is writing a sync program that would run to "backup" the current Outlook calendar dates, and adjust them before or after the BlackBerry sync runs.
That seems like overkill - after, don't I already have a sync program?
