Creation date of SPWebApplication object?

Question

I would like to know the creation date and time of all Web Applications in a SharePoint farm. But after studying the SDK and inspecting SPWebApplication objects with SharePoint Manager it looks like this information is not available! Can you confirm this or do you know a way of obtaining these metadata?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of such a property for a web application. Two alternatives come to mind:

1. Look at the Created property on the root SPSite's RootWeb, or even look for the earliest date across all site collections' subwebs. Not exceedingly reliable.

2. Use IisSettings to check the creation date of the IIS sites' folders on the file system. It seems to me this should be pretty reliable as long as the server was part of the farm when the web app was created.