Question

I am able to get date and time using:

DateTime now = DateTime.Now;

How can I get the current date and time separately in the DateTime format itself?

I am not using the DateTime picker dialog box in ASP.NET (C#).

Answer 1

Well, you can get just today’s date as a DateTime using the Today property:

 DateTime today = DateTime.Today;

or more generally, you can use the Date property. For example, if you wanted the UTC date you could use:

 DateTime dateTime = DateTime.UtcNow.Date;

It’s not very clear whether that’s what you need or not though… if you’re just looking to print the date, you can use:

Console.WriteLine(dateTime.ToString("d"));

or use an explicit format:

Console.WriteLine(dateTime.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy"));

See more about standard and custom date/time format strings. Depending on your situation you may also want to specify the culture.

If you want a more expressive date/time API which allows you to talk about dates separately from times, you might want to look at the Noda Time project which I started. It’s not ready for production just yet, but we’d love to hear what you’d like to do with it…