UnixEpoch field in DateTime and DateTimeOffset in .NET Standard 2.1 (and .NET Core 2.1)

14 Nov 2018 1 mins .NET Core, .NET Standard

When I need to put some default value somewhere, I often use Unix epoch. It’s more reasonable, in my eyes, than DateTime.MinValue. But there’s no field for that value thus I always had to create it “manually”. Well, not anymore.

Let’s first do a small recap what a Unix epoch is. The Unix epoch is date and time from which Unix (and other related systems) count time and date (usually by number of seconds elapsed). It’s 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z.

I like the value because it’s reasonable date, yet for a lot of line-of-business systems it’s clear that this is not a real value. Hence, I often used it, but because there was no field for it, I had to create it always myself. I.e. by using new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc). But starting with .NET Core 2.1 and more importantly for me as a library writer with .NET Standard 2.1 it’s available as a predefined field for both DateTime as well as DateTimeOffset.

Now to just wait for .NET Standard 2.1 to become “the norm”.

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.