protobuf-net does not deserialize DateTime.Kind correctly

As an extension to Ben's answer... strictly speaking, protobuf has no definition of time, so there is nothing to retain compatibility with. I'm tempted to add support for this in v2, but sadly it would add 2 bytes per value. I have yet to think about whether this is acceptable... for example, I could perhaps default to "unspecified" so that only explicitly local or UTC dates have a value.

protobuf.net has to maintain compatibility with the protobuf binary format, which is designed for the Java date/time datatypes. No Kind field in Java -> No Kind support in the protobuf binary format -> Kind not transferred across the network. Or something along those lines.

As it turns out, protobuf.net encodes the Ticks field (only), you'll find the code in BclHelpers.cs.

But feel free to add another field in your protobuf message definition for this value.