Min and Max DateTime values in C#

Any variable of type DateTime can be assigned appropriate values for handling date and time data.Any value which lies between the DateTime.MaxValue and DateTime.MinValue can be assigned to a DateTime variable.

Following example demonstrates this.

Ticks is a property of DateTime variable which represents the variable as an integer.In the following example we are validating if a variable lies within the valid range for a datetime variable.

long largeNumberofTicks = long.MaxValue;
//largeNumberofTicks = 9223372036854775807

bool isValidValue;
// DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks=3155378975999999999
// DateTime.MinValue.Ticks=0
if (largeNumberofTicks >= DateTime.MinValue.Ticks && largeNumberofTicks <= DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks)
{
isValidValue = true;
}
else
{
isValidValue = false;
}

In the above example isValidValue will be set to false as long.MaxValue>DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks.

DateTime Min value

DateTime.MinValue is the minimum value that can be assigned to a DateTime variable.It is equal to “1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM”.

DateTime Default value

As value types can not be assigned null values like reference types so they always have some default initial value.
DateTime is also a value type ,so it can not be assigned a null value.So DateTime variable always have some value.
By default DateTime variable is assigned DateTime.MinValue value.

So if we want to check if a datetime variable has been assigned a value we can use the following code

if (dateVariable == DateTime.MinValue)
{
 //minimum value
}

We have declared Person class below

class Person
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public DateTime dateOfBirth;
}

In the following code we are creating an object of person class and checking the value of dateOfBirth.

class Program
{

static void Main(string[] args)
{
Person person = new Person();
if (person.dateOfBirth == DateTime.MinValue)
{
Console.WriteLine("dateOfBirth has a value of " + DateTime.MinValue);
}

}

}

On executing the above code we get the following output

dateOfBirth has a value of 01-01-0001 12:00:00 AM

DateTime Max Value

DateTime.MaxValue just like DateTime.MinValue is a readonly field.It represents the maximum value that can be represented by a datetime variable.The value of this field is 23:59:59.9999999 UTC, December 31, 9999

if(dt.Ticks> DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks)
{
//invalid date
}
else
{
//valid date
}

 

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