Equivalent of __DATE__, __TIME__ macros in C#

Question

Is there an equivalent of __DATE__ and __TIME__ in C#?

Basically what I'm trying to do is place some build timestamping in a C# application.

One possibility I saw on Microsoft's website was to do the following:

Assembly assem = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
Version vers = assem.GetName().Version;
DateTime buildDate = new DateTime(2000, 1, 1).AddDays(vers.Build).AddSeconds(vers.Revision * 2);
Console.WriteLine(vers.ToString());
Console.WriteLine(buildDate.ToString());

However, this only works if your version in AssemblyInfo.cs is "1.0..", which ours won't be.

Answer 1

If you are trying to autogenerate your build and revision numbers, I would look into the following project on CodePlex:

http://autobuildversion.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

You could look at customizing the projects .csproj file. This is just an ordinary msbuild file and you can hook into the BeforeBuild target to generate or update a file, perhaps storing this value in a custom assembly level attribute.

I'd imagine the msbuild community tasks would be useful here as they have several helpful tasks for things like token replacement within a file.

Answer 3

I recommend customising your build script to write the date time into the file. The MSBuild Community Tasks project has a Time task that can be used for exactly this.

Answer 4

Ugly, and requires certain permissions, but if this is for internal use:

            // assume the relevant using statements above...
            FileVersionInfo vi = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);
            FileInfo fileInfo = new System.IO.FileInfo(vi.FileName);
            DateTime createTime = fileInfo.CreationTime;