Skip to main content

Get number of milliseconds since Unix epoch

I'm having fun creating a small open-source project(more about that later). In a part of this project I need to integrate with an existing API.

Here is (part of) the JSON schema that describes the data contract:

As you can see I need to specify a timestamp value which should be provided as a number. The description adds some extra details:

A number representing the milliseconds elapsed since the UNIX epoch.

Mmmh. The question is first of all what is the UNIX epoch and second how can I generate this number in C#?

Let’s find out!

The UNIX epoch

The Unix epoch is the time 00:00:00 UTC on 1st January 1970. Why this date? No clue, it seems to be just an arbitrary date. It is used to calculate the Unix time.

If you want to learn more, check out Wikipedia.

Get number of milliseconds since Unix epoch in C#

Now that we now what the UNIX epoch is, what is the best way to calculate the number of milliseconds since Unix epoch in C#?

You can start to calculate this manually but C# has built-in support for this.

A first way to achieve our goal is through the DateTimeOffset.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds() method:

And if you really want to calculate this yourself:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more