Most developers would rather not think about the problems of writing code that supports world wide use. Yet, some of the most interesting problems occur here, and those of us that teach this subject try to combine "ordinary" development steps with internationalization coding to show that the two are so closely intertwined as to be essentially indistinguishable. Interest is especially peaked when the same development problem is pursued on different platforms. In this talk, we show how to build a simple program that introduces date, time, and calendar handling capabilities on Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Microsoft .NET. Specifically, we show how to write parallel programs on these two platforms that use the Internet to access the National Institute of Standards and Technology's very accurate clock and render the data received in as many formats as are available for any selected world region. Along the way, we encounter a bit of socket programming, direct operating system calls, Julian Dates, date and time classification and formatting, custom controls, and how XML can help in managing a list of service providers. We also show how similarities and contrasts between the two platforms sometimes generate practically the same solutions in some cases and different ones in others.