UPDATE: I think a good measure of a blog is the intelligence and quality of the comments. This comments in response to this post makes my blog look good (not all do).

As several commenters pointed out, the function returns a local DateTime adjusted from the specified UTC date. By calling ToUniversalTime() on the result, I get the behavior I am looking for. That’s why I ask you smart people before making an ass of myself on the bug report site.

Before I post this as a bug, can anyone tell me why this test fails when I think it should pass?

[Test]
public void ParseUsingAssumingUniversalReturnsDateTimeKindUtc()
{
  IFormatProvider culture = new CultureInfo("en-US", true);
  DateTime utcDate = DateTime.Parse("10/01/2006 19:30", culture, 
    DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal);
  Assert.AreEqual(DateTimeKind.Utc, utcDate.Kind, 
    "Expected AssumeUniversal would return a UTC date.");
}

What is going on here is I am calling the method DateTime.Parse passing in a DateTimeStyle.AssumeUniversal as an argument. My understanding is that it should indicate to the Parse method that the passed in string denotes a Coordinated Univeral Time (aka UTC).

But when I check the Kind property of the resulting DateTime instance, it returns DatTimeKind.Local rather than DatTimeKind.Utc.

The unit test demonstrates what I think should happen. Either this really is a bug, or I am wrong in my assumptions, in which case I would like to know, how are you supposed to parse a string representing a date/time in the UTC timezone?