What is the proper way to add three hours to a DateTime for the PST timezone? Is it this?

var d = DateTime.Parse("Oct 26, 2003 12:00:00 AM");
var later = d.AddHours(3.0);
Console.WriteLine(later); // displays 10/26/2003 03:00:00 AM which is NOT correct!

A valiant attempt, but wrong. Instead try this:

var d = DateTime.Parse("Oct 26, 2003 12:00:00 AM");
var later = d.ToUniversalTime().AddHours(3.0).ToLocalTime();
Console.WriteLine(later); // displays 10/26/2003 02:00:00 AM which is correct!

Or better yet, use DateTimeOffset.

const string dateFormat = "MMM dd yyyy h:mm tt zzz";
var d = DateTimeOffset.ParseExact("Oct 26 2003 12:00 AM -07:00", dateFormat, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
var later = d.AddHours(3.0);
Console.WriteLine(later);

Why all the rigamarole of converting to universal time and back to local time? A little thing we like to call Daylight savings time. Without the conversion, adding three hours would have set the time to 3:00 AM which would be wrong.

Realizing this probably would have saved me from many hours of intense debugging sessions. I remember one particular case with a system of scripts and tools I set up to analyze the very large log files for a big client. It hummed along nicely until one fine spring day when it failed miserably. After an entire day of tracking down the source of the problem, I finally nailed it down to a script’s mishandling of Daylight Savings.

To find out more about proper DateTime handling, read the following article concerning best practices with manipulating date times.