Compile date and time

Question

Is there some clever way of getting the date and time of when the dll was built/compiled?

I’m using the assembly version numbering and reflection to retrieve and dis

Answer 1

What about:

new FileInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).LastWriteTime;

Answer 2

You can get it by this way:

File.GetLastWriteTime(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);

Returns DateTime object.

Answer 3

If you set the assembly version (usually in AssemblyInfo.cs) to Major.Minor.* (e.g. 1.0.*), then you can probably retrieve the build date at runtime with something like this:

var version = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version;
DateTime buildDate = new DateTime(2000, 1, 1)
    .AddDays(version.Build)
    .AddSeconds(version.Revision*2);

When using a * for the third and fourth part of the assembly version, then these two parts are set automatically at compile time to the following values:

• third part is the number of days since 2000-01-01
• fourth part is the number of seconds since midnight divided by two (although some MSDN pages say it is a random number)

Oh, and you have to take care of daylight saving time yourself (e.g. add one hour if it's daylight saving time).