The Second Date is Always Easier

The Date deep dive continues as we focus in on C# and JavaScript, while Michael reminisces about the fluorescent crayons, Joe needs a new tip of the week, and Allen confuses time zones.

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News

• We take a moment to say thank you to everyone that left us a review:
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• Allen finally settled on a new laptop, the Gigabyte Aero 15-x9 (Amazon). Video reviews coming soon.

Developer Dates Gone Bad

… in C#

• In C#, precision is stored to 100 nanoseconds, also known as ticks.
  • A DateTime value is the number of ticks since 12:00 midnight, January 1, 0001 A.D. (C.E.) in the Gregorian calendar.
    • This excludes ticks that would be added by leap seconds.
• The problem with DateTime is similar to that of DATETIME2 in SQL Server, i.e. it can not store any particular timezone offset.
  • However, you can define the DateTime.Kind to be Unspecified or Local or UTC.
• Matt Johnson breaks down when to use DateTime vs when to use DateTimeOffset in this Stack Overflow answer.
  • And further explains it in his Pluralsight course.

… JavaScript

• Mozilla’s documentation for Date is awesome.
• Date.value represents the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC with a range of ± 100,000,000 days relative to this same date.
  • And similar to C#, this excludes leap seconds.
• JavaScript Date objects can only be instantiated by calling the Date as a constructor (i.e. the word new is in front of it like let myDateObject = new Date().
  • Otherwise, calling it as a regular function, like let myDateString = Date(), will return a string rather than a Date object.
• The constructor’s monthIndex argument is 0-based, i.e. January = 0 and December = 11.
• When the constructor is called with multiple arguments and a value is greater than its logical range, i.e. 42 is provided for the day value, the adjacent value will be adjusted.
• The constructor assumes local time.
  • To specify UTC, use new Date(Date.UTC(…)) with the same arguments.
• Date.prototype.toISOString() converts a Date to a string following the ISO 8601 extended format.
• Matt Byers wrote an excellent article on DZone that compares the performance between date-fns and Moment.js.

Resources We Like

• ISO 8601 (Wikipedia)
  
• List of tz database time zones (Wikipedia)
  
• The Difference Between GMT and UTC (timeanddate.com)
• UTC is enough for everyone … right? (zachholman.com)
• DateTime Struct (docs.microsoft.com)
• DateTime vs DateTimeOffset (Stack Overflow)
• Noda Time – A better date and time API for .NET (nodatime.org)
• Date and Time Fundamentals (Pluralsight)
• Joda-Time – The de facto standard date and time library for Java prior to Java SE 8. (joda.org)
• CultureInfo.InvariantCulture Property (docs.microsoft.com)
• Date (developer.mozilla.org)
• date-fns – Modern JavaScript date utility library (date-fns.org)
• Moment.js – Parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates and times in JavaScript. (momentjs.com)
• Moment.js vs date-fns: How to Spot Slow Loading Scripts and Fix Them Quickly (DZone)

Tip of the Week

• Be sure to check out our YouTube channel!
• Give Paket a whirl as the dependency manager for your .NET project. (Packet FAQ)
• Take screenshots of webpages from the command line using either Firefox or Chrome (Bleeping Computer)

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