C# Timestamp Now

As a .NET developer, you may need to work with timestamps frequently. The DateTime struct in C# provides a way to handle dates and times, representing them as a number of ticks that have elapsed since 12:00 midnight, January 1, 0001.

Get Current Timestamp in C#

To get the current timestamp in C#, you can use the DateTime.UtcNow property, which returns the current UTC date and time. You can then convert it to a Unix timestamp (number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970) using the DateTimeOffset.ToUnixTimeSeconds method:

DateTimeOffset now = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow;
long timestamp = now.ToUnixTimeSeconds();

Alternatively, you can use the DateTimeOffset.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds method to get the timestamp in milliseconds:

DateTimeOffset now = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow;
long timestamp = now.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds();

Note that DateTime.UtcNow returns the current date and time in UTC time zone, which is independent of the local time zone. If you need to get the current date and time in the local time zone, you can use DateTime.Now instead:

DateTimeOffset now = DateTimeOffset.Now;
long timestamp = now.ToUnixTimeSeconds();

Convert Timestamp to DateTime

To convert a Unix timestamp back to a DateTime object, you can create a new DateTimeOffset object from the timestamp and then use the DateTimeOffset.LocalDateTime property to get the local date and time:

long timestamp = 1627561667;
DateTimeOffset dateTimeOffset = DateTimeOffset.FromUnixTimeSeconds(timestamp);
DateTime localDateTime = dateTimeOffset.LocalDateTime;

Similarly, you can use the DateTimeOffset.FromUnixTimeMilliseconds method to convert a timestamp in milliseconds:

long timestamp = 1627561667000;
DateTimeOffset dateTimeOffset = DateTimeOffset.FromUnixTimeMilliseconds(timestamp);
DateTime localDateTime = dateTimeOffset.LocalDateTime;

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to get the current timestamp and convert it to a DateTime object in C#. With this knowledge, you can handle dates and times more efficiently in your .NET applications.