DateTime.Ticks Property

A single tick represents one hundred nanoseconds or one ten-millionth of a second. There are 10,000 ticks in a millisecond.

The value of this property represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 12:00:00 midnight, January 1, 0001, which represents DateTime.MinValue. It does not include the number of ticks that are attributable to leap seconds.

The following example uses the Ticks property to display the number of ticks that have elapsed since the beginning of the twenty-first century and to instantiate a TimeSpan object. The TimeSpan object is then used to display the elapsed time using several other time intervals.

DateTime centuryBegin = new DateTime(2001, 1, 1);
DateTime currentDate = DateTime.Now;

long elapsedTicks = currentDate.Ticks - centuryBegin.Ticks;
TimeSpan elapsedSpan = new TimeSpan(elapsedTicks);

Console.WriteLine("Elapsed from the beginning of the century to {0:f}:", 
                   currentDate);
Console.WriteLine("   {0:N0} nanoseconds", elapsedTicks * 100);
Console.WriteLine("   {0:N0} ticks", elapsedTicks);
Console.WriteLine("   {0:N2} seconds", elapsedSpan.TotalSeconds);
Console.WriteLine("   {0:N2} minutes", elapsedSpan.TotalMinutes);
Console.WriteLine("   {0:N0} days, {1} hours, {2} minutes, {3} seconds", 
                  elapsedSpan.Days, elapsedSpan.Hours, 
                  elapsedSpan.Minutes, elapsedSpan.Seconds);
// If run on December 14, 2007, at 15:23, this example displays the 
// following output to the console: 
//    Elapsed from the beginning of the century to Friday, December 14, 2007 3:23 PM: 
//          219,338,580,000,000,000 nanoseconds 
//          2,193,385,800,000,000 ticks 
//          219,338,580.00 seconds 
//          3,655,643.00 minutes 
//          2,538 days, 15 hours, 23 minutes, 0 seconds

Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Starter Edition, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2000 SP4, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 98, Windows CE, Windows Mobile for Smartphone, Windows Mobile for Pocket PC, Xbox 360, Zune

The .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework do not support all versions of every platform. For a list of the supported versions, see .NET Framework System Requirements.

.NET Framework

.NET Compact Framework

XNA Framework

Reference