DateTime.Ticks Property
[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]
Gets the number of ticks that represent the date and time of this instance.
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
Property Value
Type: System.Int64The number of ticks that represents the date and time of this instance. The value is between DateTime.MinValue.Ticks and DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks.
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.
Dim centuryBegin As Date = #1/1/2001# Dim currentDate As Date = Date.Now Dim elapsedTicks As Long = currentDate.Ticks - centuryBegin.Ticks Dim elapsedSpan As New TimeSpan(elapsedTicks) outputBlock.Text += String.Format("Elapsed from the beginning of the century to {0:f}:", _ currentDate) & vbCrLf outputBlock.Text += String.Format(" {0:N0} nanoseconds", elapsedTicks * 100) & vbCrLf outputBlock.Text += String.Format(" {0:N0} ticks", elapsedTicks) & vbCrLf outputBlock.Text += String.Format(" {0:N2} seconds", elapsedSpan.TotalSeconds) & vbCrLf outputBlock.Text += String.Format(" {0:N2} minutes", elapsedSpan.TotalMinutes) & vbCrLf outputBlock.Text += String.Format(" {0:N0} days, {1} hours, {2} minutes, {3} seconds", _ elapsedSpan.Days, elapsedSpan.Hours, _ elapsedSpan.Minutes, elapsedSpan.Seconds) & vbCrLf ' If run on December 14, 2007, at 15:23, this example displays the ' following output: ' 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