Working With Dates

DateTime

In the System namespace, we have access to the DateTime class.

var dateTime = new DateTime(2020, 09, 28); // year, month, day
var now = DateTime.Now;
var today = DateTime.Today;

Console.WriteLine("Hour: ", now.Hour);

Note: DateTime objects are immutable. You can, however, increment/decrement time with them using any AddX methods that return a new DateTime object:

var tomorrow = now.AddDays(1);
var yesterday = now.AddDays(-1);

You can also convert DateTime objects to strings:

now.ToLongDateString();
now.ToShortDateString();
now.ToLongTimeString();
now.ToShortTimeString();
now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm"); // date and time WITH format specifier

TimeSpan

TimeSpan is where you can represent a length of time.

var timeSpan = new TimeSpan(1, 0, 0); // hours, minutes, seconds
var timeSpan2 = TimeSpan.FromHours(1); // more semantic version

timeSpan.Minutes; // returns 0
timeSpan.TotalMinutes; // returns 60

Once again, TimeSpan is immutable, but it has useful methods for updating that return a new TimeSpan object:

var newTimeSpan = timeSpan.Add(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(8));
var anotherTimeSpan = timeSpan.Subtract(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(4));

Conversion to and from strings:

timeSpan.ToString(); // to string
TimeSpan.Parse("01:45:01"); // from string