Date handling client side

Have had some issues with dates returned from REST services.  

Initially I found that the default .net serializer will output the format "Date(\n)\"  where n is the number of seconds since 1980 or some such date. 

Not sure how everyone else feels about this format but I think its ugly as hell and difficult to debug and work with.

So next I started returned the dates as strings from the WCF REST service.  

Best practice seems to be to always deal with UTC in ISO8061.

Here is a small helper method to deal with it.

Date format including time zone

 public static string ToISOLocalDate(DateTime dateTime)
        {
            TimeSpan offset = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.GetUtcOffset(dateTime);
            return dateTime.ToString(string.Format("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.00+{0}:{1}", offset.Hours, offset.Minutes == 0 ? "00" : offset.Minutes.ToString()));
        }

I'm using this class in the services, to return a DateTime which includes the timezone offset.

Date format in UTC

public static string ToISODate(DateTime dateTime)
        {
            return dateTime.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.00Z");
        }

This helper method returns Zulu time.