First of all, I have to proclaim my love for the System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan object. I have to say that other than System.Data.DataSet family of objects, they’re my favorite. The thing I like most, is that they give you just enough to usefully and easily extend the functionality, without being bloated and hard to understand. A sincere thanks to the people involved in making them easy to use.
As an example, I needed recently needed a bunch of date calculations, like WorkWeekStart, WorkWeekEnd, etc. I came up with the following enum and method which I can use to derive all sorts of date caluclations:
public
enum DateDirection{
Forward,
Backward
}
public
static DateTime GetDay(System.DayOfWeek dayOfWeek, int numberWeeks, DateDirection direction, bool dayEnd){
// Get the initial date.
DateTime checkDate = DateTime.Today;
// If today’s not the day we’re looking for, loop and find the date
if(!(checkDate.DayOfWeek == dayOfWeek && numberWeeks == 0))
{
int i = 0;
// Loop for number of weeks…
do
{
// Go forward or back one day..
checkDate = (direction == DateDirection.Backward) ? checkDate.AddDays(-1) : checkDate.AddDays(1);
// Loop until we find the correct day
while(checkDate.DayOfWeek != dayOfWeek)
{
checkDate = (direction == DateDirection.Backward) ? checkDate.AddDays(-1) : checkDate.AddDays(1);
}
} while(i++ < numberWeeks); // Loop for the number of weeks.
}
// If we need the end of the day, add the ticks to get us there.
if(dayEnd) checkDate = checkDate.AddTicks(System.TimeSpan.TicksPerDay – 1);
return checkDate;
}
Using this one method, I can derive all sorts of date calculations, like so:
/// <summary>
/// Start of week is Sunday 12:00 am
/// </summary>
public static DateTime WeekStart
{
get { return GetDay(DayOfWeek.Sunday, 0, DateDirection.Backward);}
}
/// <summary>
/// Saturday at 11:59:59
/// </summary>
public static DateTime WeekEnd
{
get { return GetDay(DayOfWeek.Saturday, 0, DateDirection.Forward, true); }
}
Ever tried doing this sort of thing with other frameworks? Uggh! The ease with which I was able to do this, was really one of those things that makes me a true-beliver in the .NET framework.
-Brendan
