Convert Date to Milliseconds

Question

I am working with Visual Studio 2010, MVC 3 and C#. I am creating some highcharts and need to have the x-axis be a date. I am pulling the dates from a database and adding them to and array that will then be passed to highcharts. I think highcharts requires the dates to be in millisecond format. Ho do I go about converting a DateTime of '12/20/2011 5:10:13 PM" for example to milliseconds?

Answer 1

Once you figure out what you want to calculate milliseconds from, you can just take one DateTime object from another to get a TimeSpan object. From TimeSpan you can get TotalMilliseconds.

In other words, if start and end are DateTime objects, you can do this:

double milliseconds = (end - start).TotalMilliseconds;

Answer 2

You can use the DateTime.Ticks property and convert the value to milliseconds.

The value of this property represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 12:00:00 midnight, January 1, 0001, which represents DateTime.MinValue. It does not include the number of ticks that are attributable to leap seconds.

A single tick represents one hundred nanoseconds or one ten-millionth of a second. There are 10,000 ticks in a millisecond.

Answer 3

The .Ticks in C# DateTime gives you the value of any time in ticks. You can thereafter convert to milliseconds as shown below:

long dateticks = DateTime.Now.Ticks;
long datemilliseconds = dateticks / TimeSpan.TicksPerMillisecond;

Answer 4

DateTime[] dates = ;

var minDate = dates.Min();

var msDates = dates.Select(date => (date - minDate).TotalMilliseconds).ToArray();