Question

I’m creating a scheduler and need to be able to do the following in C#:

1. Find the 1st Tuesday of June 2012
2. Find the last Friday of March 2008
3. Find every Saturday in January 2013
4. Find the 3rd Friday in July 2009
5. Find every Saturday over the next 3 months
6. Find every day in March 2018

The results should come back as DateTime or List<DateTime>.

Answer 1

Here are methods to find the first/last specified day of week in a given month:

public DateTime GetFirstDayOfWeekInMonth(int year, int month, DayOfWeek dayOfWeek)
{
    DateTime dt = new DateTime(year, month, 1);
    int first = (int)dt.DayOfWeek;
    int wanted = (int)dayOfWeek;
    if (wanted < first)
        wanted += 7;
    return dt.AddDays(wanted - first);
}

public DateTime GetLastDayOfWeekInMonth(int year, int month, DayOfWeek dayOfWeek)
{
    int daysInMonth = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetDaysInMonth(year, month);
    DateTime dt = new DateTime(year, month, daysInMonth);
    int last = (int)dt.DayOfWeek;
    int wanted = (int)dayOfWeek;
    if (wanted > last)
        last += 7;
    return dt.AddDays(wanted - last);
}

From those, you can easily find the answers to the other questions… just add 7 days to find the next occurence of the day you’re looking for

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EDIT: thinking more about it, it would be pretty handy to have that in the form of extension methods, such as :

Console.WriteLine("Next monday : {0}", DateTime.Today.Next(DayOfWeek.Monday));
Console.WriteLine("Last saturday : {0}", DateTime.Today.Previous(DayOfWeek.Saturday));

Here is the implementation :

public static class DateExtensions
{
    public static DateTime Next(this DateTime from, DayOfWeek dayOfWeek)
    {
        int start = (int)from.DayOfWeek;
        int wanted = (int)dayOfWeek;
        if (wanted < start)
            wanted += 7;
        return from.AddDays(wanted - start);
    }

    public static DateTime Previous(this DateTime from, DayOfWeek dayOfWeek)
    {
        int end = (int)from.DayOfWeek;
        int wanted = (int)dayOfWeek;
        if (wanted > end)
            end += 7;
        return from.AddDays(wanted - end);
    }
}

It’s probably more flexible than the first methods I suggested… With that, you can easily do things like that :

// Print all Sundays between 2009/01/01 and 2009/03/31
DateTime from = new DateTime(2009, 1, 1);
DateTime to = new DateTime(2009, 3, 31);
DateTime sunday = from.Next(DayOfWeek.Sunday);
while(sunday <= to)
{
   Console.WriteLine(sunday);
   sunday = sunday.AddDays(7);
}