I'm trying to roll my own archiver for SharePoint. I always try to let the underlying object serialize itself. Only when it fails do I try to use .ToString(). Anyway, while inspecting the Properties that are coming from an SPFile, and the Fields from the SPFile.Item.Fields, I'm running across some date/time properties that seem to be stored as strings like "0x01ce30e0|0x7ee3f800" in the Properties collection, but as DateTime's like "2013-04-03T23:00:00" in the Fields collection.
(To make things even more interesting, it looks like if SharePoint is storing a date, rather than a date/time, then it will use something like "2013-04-03T23:00:00".)
Anyway, my questions are: - Should I try to translate the the pair of hex numbers into a a DateTime, or just leave it alone? - If there is a conflict between a Field and a Property, which should I consider authoritative?