How to use the .NET Timer class to trigger an event at a specific time?

Question

I would like to have an event triggered in my app which runs continuously during the day at a certain time, say at 4:00pm. I thought about running the timer every second and

Answer 1

.NET has lots of timer classes, but they all take time spans relative to the current time. With a relative time, there are lots of things to consider before you start your timer and to monitor for while your timer is running.

• What if the computer goes into a standby state?
• What if the computer's time changes?
• What if the expiration time is after a daylight savings time transition?
• What if the user changes the computer's time zone after you started your timer such that there is a new time zone transition before expiration that wasn't previously there?

The operating system is in a great place to handle this complexity. Application code running on .NET is not.

For Windows, the NuGet package AbsoluteTimer wraps an operating system timer that expires at an absolute time.