Question

Why is the minimum resolution of a DateTime based on Ticks (100-nanosecond units) rather than on Milliseconds?

Answer 1

• TimeSpan and DateTime use the same Ticks making operations like adding a TimeSpan to a DateTime trivial.

• More precision is good. Mainly useful for TimeSpan, but above reason transfers that to DateTime.

  For example StopWatch measures short time intervals often shorter than a millisecond. It can return a TimeSpan.
  In one of my projects I used TimeSpan to address audio samples. 100ns is short enough for that, milliseconds wouldn’t be.

• Even using milliseconds ticks you need an Int64 to represent DateTime. But then you’re wasting most of the range, since years outside 0 to 9999 aren’t really useful. So they chose ticks as small as possible while allowing DateTime to represent the year 9999.

  There are about 2^61.5 ticks with 100ns. Since DateTime needs two bits for timezone related tagging, 100ns ticks are the smallest power-of-ten interval that fits an Int64.

So using longer ticks would decrease precision, without gaining anything. Using shorter ticks wouldn’t fit 64 bits. => 100ns is the optimal value given the constraints.