Print Date and Time In Visual Studio C++ build?

Question

How would I print the date and time for the purposes of the build. Ie: When the console for my application starts up I want to do this:

Binary Build date: 03/03/2009 @ 10:00AM

I think this would be a super useful function for all applications to have behind the scenes for programmers, especially in a team environment.

Is there a simple way to do this using Visual Studio 2008 in C++. Thanks.

Answer 1

Similar to Virne's answer I created a simple header file called "BuildDate.h" with the following contents:

#define BUILD_DATE __DATE__ " " __TIME__

I touch the file using GnuWin32 touch command in my pre-build event:

touch.exe BuildDate.h

Then I include the header file in any code where I want access to the BUILD_DATE string. E.g.:

#include "BuildDate.h"
...
logger->Log("Build Date: " BUILD_DATE);