Determine the number of days between dates in VB.NET

by Irina Medvinskaya | Mar 22, 2007 9:12:00 PM

Tags: Microsoft development tools, Programming languages, .NET, Irina Medvinskaya, TimeSpan object, TimeSpan, strMsgText, dtStartDate, Microsoft Visual Basic.Net, Visual Basic Tips Newsletter

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Takeaway: Trying to figure out how many days there are between two given dates? Find out why you may want to use VB.NET's TimeSpan object.

Developers often deal with various date manipulations in applications. If you need a simple way to figure out how many days there are between two given dates, consider using VB.NET's TimeSpan object.

Listing A shows how you can use the TimeSpan object to obtain the elapsed amount of time between two dates. Then you will use the Subtract method to find the actual number of days between the two dates.

Notes about the example

I set a start date with a Date variable, dtStartDate, and set its value to January 1, 2007. I also declared other variables I will use, including: tsTimeSpan as a TimeSpan object, iNumberOfDays as an Integer, and strMsgText as a String. I set the value of the tsTimeSpan variable to the difference between current date/time and the value of dtStartDate.

In order to calculate the number of days between current date/time (Now) and the dtStartDate, I use the TimeSpan object's Days property and set its value to iNumberOfDays. Then I create a text that I will show in a message box by concatenating necessary text and variables in setting the value for strMsgText. The last step is displaying the value of strMsgText in a Message box.

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