This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by john hume. Original Post: FluentTime: a fluent interface in C# for working with dates and times Feed Title: El Humidor Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ElHumidor Feed Description: John D. Hume on Ruby and development with agile teams. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by john hume Latest Posts From El Humidor

After working fairly late last night I was too wound up to go to sleep when I got home. Something possessed me to start creating a little C# library providing a fluent interface for working with DateTimes, DateTimeOffsets, and TimeSpans inspired by ActiveSupport's active_support/core_ext/numeric/time and related extensions.

After about 3.Hours(30.Minutes()) the straightforward part had come together. You can do stuff like this with it:

var toothBrushingTime = 10.Minutes().Before(bedTime);
var lightsOutForReal = 1.Hour(30.Minutes()).After(bedTime);
...
Assert.That(actual, Is.LessThan(50.Milliseconds().After(expected)));

These built in .NET types are pretty easy to work with and made the implementation very easy (except for the bit where I discovered that TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds takes a double but only has whole-millisecond precision).

This morning I put it up on Github. You can find FluentTime here.

The one more complex thing I'd still like to add is a variable-length variation on TimeSpan for handling units like months and years. I'm interested to see how clean I can keep things when my type will only take on a specific value based on the date-time value it's being added to or subtracted from. That ought to be a good opportunity for exploring operator overloading. (Unsurprisingly that hasn't come up in my day job just yet.)