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Asked: 2026-05-29T10:32:23+00:00

I don’t have much experience with Utc Dates, but from what I know, they

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I don’t have much experience with Utc Dates, but from what I know, they are in most cases the best way to store dates.

But I’m currently working on a program and I’m in doubt what will be the best way to store my dates. In the program, a user can follow a course for five weeks, starting on the day of registration. Every day he has to fill in a form, which is saved for that day.

Currently, I’m saving the StartDate and EndDate of the course as DateTime (no Utc) Should I save this as Utc, or isn’t it necessary? Because I only need the day (if the user registers on February 8th at 10:04, all the system needs to know is that February 8th is the first day of the course. Is there maybe a better way to store this information? And what would be the best way to save system-event-dates (like user logged in, account created, etc)?

I used to store the form-data also with a DateTime, to calculate on which day it was submitted, but I changed it so it only saves the relative day-number (e.g. day 5).

Btw, I’m using C# and a SQL Server database.

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  1. Editorial Team

    UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) has to do with the time component of a date. It’s a standard way to store DateTimes so that you can compare without worrying about timezones.

    If all you are worried about is the Date Component & Timezone/Location is unimportant you could just store it in the database as 2012-02-01 00:00:00

    You can get the date only component in .NET using

    System.DateTime.Today;

    Alternatively if you’re working with some other Date…

    DateTime dt = DateTime.Now;
dt.Date; // <--- this will give the Date Component with the Time stripped back to 00:00:00
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