[thomas130]

Hi guys I'm trying to do an if statement to compared two dates if the first is less or equal then then do this exit if then

This is what I what I have done so far but I can see that I need do something more with the statement to be able to compared dates. Could you give me an example of how to do it.

           

FileInfo fileinfo = new FileInfo(@"\\ops.expressandstar.co.uk\KnowledgePlanningVersions\knowledge planning.zip");
            FileInfo fileinfo2 = new FileInfo(@"c:\Temp\knowledge planning.zip");
            DateTime time = fileinfo.CreationTime;
            DateTime time2 = fileinfo2.CreationTime;


         
            if (time = time2)
            {Environment.Exit(0);}
            else
            { Console.WriteLine("The program will continue"); }

This post has been edited by thomas130: 01 December 2011 - 08:36 AM

[batesy3k]

You want something similar to this:

if(time <= time2)
{
    Environment.Exit(0);
}
else
{
    // other code
}

You are assigning time1 to the value of time2, you need the == operator at the very least but in your case you wanted less than equals so you require <=

This post has been edited by batesy3k: 01 December 2011 - 08:40 AM

[CreaturGames]

I am somewhat confused about what you are trying to do. Well, if you are doing something where if the date that current is '1' smaller than the date specified, you would do this:

TextReader tr = new StreamReader("date.txt");
            DateTime specdate = DateTime.Parse("12/1/2011 12:00:00 AM");
            if (DateTime.Today == specdate)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Matches");
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Does not match!");
            }
            Console.ReadLine();

Edited code so it was more efficient.

This post has been edited by CreaturGames: 01 December 2011 - 08:55 AM

[eclipsed4utoo]

DateTime can be compared using the greater than/less then/equal operators just like numbers.

if (time <= time2)
   Environment.Exit(0);
else
   Console.WriteLine("time 2 is less than time 1");

Also remember a single equals sign(=) is for assignment(string test = "test";).
Double equals signs(==) is for equality comparison( if (test == test2)).

[tlhIn`toq]

08 if (time = time2)


This is not a comparison of two variables. You are setting time equal to time2. A comparison requires the double equal sign.

if (time == time2)

I'm going to suggest you work more on learning C# from books, tutorials and courses before you try to engineer a purposeful application from scratch.


The stages of asking for homework help on a forum

Quote

I have a little programming experience but I need to write ...

You need to start there. I can't say "I have little experience in speaking Russian, but I have been assigned to write a mystery novel in Russian. Can you help me?"

We can help you by saying "First learn basic programming and the language of C#. Then take on assignments." Could someone here write this program for you? Sure. Could someone here map out all the processes you need to follow and do the Software Design part of this in the slim hope you could code it from there? Sure. But we don't volunteer to do the job that you're either getting paid for, or getting a grade for. You may want to read this.

For now, just work on the lessons. Do a self-teaching book from cover to cover. Then consider writing a program.

Don't try to create a useful working program to fit a need of yours (or a for-pay contract) as your introduction to coding project. When you are learning to code you don't know enough to code a program, let alone know how to engineer the architecture of a program. It would be like saying "I don't know how to read sheet music, or play an instrument. I think I'll write a 3 act opera as my first learning experience."

I don't say this to be mean. We've seen lots of new coders take this approach and we know it doesn't work. Trying to design your own programs before you understand the basics of the code language you've chosen just leads to problems, frustrations, and 'swiss-cheese' education (lots of holes).

---

Resources, references and suggestions for new programmers. - Updated Nov 2011

---

Spoiler

Finding answers to specific problems:
Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.
How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.

Once you have that MSDN page that describes the function, you may not be familiar with out to actually get useful information from that page. There is a LOT of data there. So what is the important parts? Read this guide to reading the MSDN.

Don't think you are the first person to ask a question. Try a search on this site to see if someone has already brought up this problem. Also, as soon as you post your question go to the bottom of the updated page: You will see where the system has already analyzed your question and tried to find similar threads for the same question, so check those links out.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book. There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Beginner:
C# Fundamentals: Development for absolute beginners
Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5 is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

Martyr2's mega project ideas list is a great place to start on developmental projectst that you can learn from; rather than trying to make something complex like a game as a self-teaching tool {that never works for anyone}

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

I hate sending people to another site when we have such good tutorials here, but this series shouldn't be overlooked.
Programming OOP in C# - Part 1
Programming OOP in C# - Part 2
Programming OOP in C# - Part 3
Programming OOP in C# - Part 4
Programming OOP in C# - Part 5

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on.
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Intermediate:
The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls, object serialization and more.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Separating data from GUI - PLUS - serializing the data to XML
WPF version (WPF-MVVM data binding)
Passing values between forms/classes
Decouple your multi-threaded work from the GUI so forms don't hang

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread
And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so Database tutorials right here on DIC

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Everyone:
Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Debugging in detail
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article

I urge you to work through the C# learning series here on DIC, and to work a self-teaching book from cover to cover before you even think about designing your own applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5 Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio
Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  
  Spoiler

  
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

  
  
  
• I strongly suggest installing VMware or some other virtualization technology on your development PC so you can create a couple virtual computers for testing. This would allow you to debug and test inside: WinXP32, XP64, Vista, Win7x32, Win7x64... etc. without having to actually have 5 physical PC's. Visual Studio will let you send the debug directly into one of these virtual machines so you can watch it operate, check its variables, see the crashes and so on just as if it were debugging on your real machine.
  
  
• This can't be stressed enough in today's world of cell phone messaging:
  Don't use txt/sms/leet/T9 speak like: u no, u r, dnt, wut i m do-n, coz, al gud, b4, ny1, and so on like this guy:
  
  dis not b d'hood dawg... You are sitting at a real keyboard with a real monitor, not a cell phone. You are not here texting your high school posse to come to your kegger after their shift at Taco Bell. You are here asking for help from senior coding professionals who graciously donate their valuable time to helping the next generation of coders with their chosen craft. Please try to show them, yourself and the industry some respect by writing at least at an eighth grade level. (IE: English not ebonics or SMS, real words, punctuation and so on). If you can't take your own problem/question seriously enough to write like an adult, then why would you expect anyone else to take it seriously?

[thomas130]

tlhIn`toq Icon I get what you saying and I have been reading book on the basics however I learn by doing, I did read around 200 pages on the introduction to c# until I realise the information is going in one ear and out the other.

I did the jump the gun a little before posting the thread as I managed to resolve the issue before I got a reply. I’m working on a project but I’m slowly getting there I done the basics stuff for my little program now I need to some more advanced stuff. But I will learn this stuff because of one reason is because I have too and that's how I learn.

Below is what I done so far. I know some people might laugh and think it very basic but I'm going to learn the more advance concepts to get to the stage I want.

However thank you for your advice.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using Ionic.Zip;
using System.Collections;

namespace Knowledge_Planning
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            //Knowledge Planning Script
            //Modified Date 18 October 2011

            // Display Banner
            Console.WriteLine("Knowledge Planning Update 1.3");


            // Determine whether the remote directory exists.
            Console.WriteLine("Confirming remote path exists");
            string remoteknowledgeplanning = @"\\ops.expressandstar.co.uk\KnowledgePlanningVersions\knowledge planning.zip";
            if (File.Exists(remoteknowledgeplanning))
            {
                Console.WriteLine("The path exists");
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("The Knowledge Planning does not exist to be downloaded");
                Console.WriteLine("The application will now close");
                Environment.Exit(0);
            }



            //check whether or not the machine already has the up to date knowledge planning folder

            FileInfo fileinfo = new FileInfo(@"\\ops.expressandstar.co.uk\KnowledgePlanningVersions\knowledge planning.zip");
            FileInfo fileinfo2 = new FileInfo(@"c:\Temp\knowledge planning.zip");
            DateTime time = fileinfo.CreationTime;
            DateTime time2 = fileinfo2.CreationTime;
            
            if (time <= time2)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Knowledge planning does'nt require updating");
                Environment.Exit(0);}
            else
            { Console.WriteLine("The program will continue"); }


            //remove old knowledge planning folder
            Console.WriteLine("Remove Old Knowledge Planning");
            string oldknowledgeplanning = @"C:\knowledge planning old";
            if (Directory.Exists(oldknowledgeplanning))
            {
                Console.WriteLine("The path exists");
                Directory.Delete(oldknowledgeplanning, true);
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Does'nt exists");

            }

            //rename Current knowledge planning folder
            Console.WriteLine("rename current knowledge planning");
            string currentknowledgeplanning = @"c:\knowledge planning";

            if (Directory.Exists(currentknowledgeplanning))
            {
                Console.WriteLine("The path exists");
                Directory.Move(currentknowledgeplanning, oldknowledgeplanning);

            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Does'nt exists");
            }



            //Confirm how many files are within the zip directory
            int count = 0;
            ZipFile zip = ZipFile.Read(remoteknowledgeplanning);
            int C = zip.Count;
            for (int i = 0, D = zip.Count; i < D; i++)
            {
                ZipEntry e = zip[i];
                if (!e.IsDirectory) count++;
            }
            Console.WriteLine("There are {0} file entries in the zip archive.", count);



            //copy zip to local windows temp directory
            string copy = @"c:\Temp\knowledge planning.zip";
            if (File.Exists(copy))
            { File.Delete(copy);
            File.Copy(remoteknowledgeplanning, copy);
            }
            else
            {File.Copy(remoteknowledgeplanning, copy); }

            {
                string unzip = @"c:\";
                using (ZipFile zip1 = ZipFile.Read(copy))
                {
                    foreach (ZipEntry e in zip1)
                    {
                        e.Extract(unzip, ExtractExistingFileAction.OverwriteSilently);
                    }
                }
            }


        }

    }

}

[tlhIn`toq]

I admire your persiverance. Glad to have you on board here.

I'm just going to suggest there is a wide middle ground between

Quote

I did read around 200 pages on the introduction to c# until I realise the information is going in one ear and out the other.

and trying to write your own application from scratch.

That middle ground is DOING TUTORIALS where the author has you DOING and not just reading. We learn coding by doing. Tutorials would include self-teaching books as they are basically a series of tutorials on paper in a pretty binding.

We have an entire series that takes a rookie from the beginning and moves them forward: Guided. With a plan.
http://www.dreaminco...t-c%23-program/

Please take a second look at that list of resources. If you *do* the tutorials and not just *read* them you will get a lot out of them and I think your learning will go a LOT faster.

Either way though - I think you have the right commitment to this. Happy to have you on board.

[CreaturGames]

@tlhIn`toq
I just had to 'thumbs up' this. The thing is, if you are new to programming, you need to aim at lower level applications, not jump into something more difficult than you can handle.

[tlhIn`toq]

I agree completely. Which is why I gave him (in post 5) my recommendation to work more on tutorials and a complete resources list. Then backed up that recommendation in post 7.

You can lead a horse to water but...

And lets face it, we all have to stretch our wings and reach beyond our comfort zone in order to expand our skillset.

There is a difference between learning the basics and the language by writing a program from scratch (which results in horrible failure, crash and burn, morale degradation, automatic weapons purchase, clock tower sniper incidents, etc.) and learning through the books and tutorials - THEN - stretching by pushing into new areas from scratch.

All you can do is try to point this out and hope for the best choices to be made.