I vote for setting it in the procedure (or the default for the column, for inserts). There is no reason to pass all of this information through all the layers unless you need microsecond accuracy to differentiate e.g. when the user clicked the button vs. when the transaction was committed in the database. This is especially true if you have a distributed application - do you want to rely on all of your web/application servers to be in sync, never mind end user workstations for client/server apps? You may have servers in different data centers, all with different time zones, some observing DST, some not, etc. DateTime.UtcNow
should obliterate most of those differences but I'd still go back to passing all that data around for no reason. The database knows what time it is; let it store the value for you and keep all that logic out of the application.
(Also if you are storing UTC time, do you really need DATETIMEOFFSET
? If so, then you still need some way for the procedure to know which time zone this information came from. If not, then you should probably just use SMALLDATETIME/DATETIME/DATETIME2
depending on accuracy required.)