Get passed milliseconds from Timer [Solved]

[Xmen Real]

I'm developing a countdown timee that will support Pause function and I'm wondering that how can I get the passed milliseconds from Timer. I'm not sure that it is possible but perhaps it might possible through API. I do not want timer calls tick event after each millisecond, what I want is once I set Interval(eg. 5000) then if I call Pause just after 3000 passed then when resume it should start with 3000. It would be easily possible if I can get the Timer passed millisecond... any idea guys or any other way ? edited this helped me

Environment.TickCount

thanks all of you guys ;)

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modified on Thursday, April 9, 2009 8:54 AM

[Rob Philpott]

You could use DateTime.Now and subtract one from another to give you a timespan. Timers I don't believe allow you to access their internals. DateTime has a resolution of about 15ms I believe.

Regards, Rob Philpott.

[_groo_]

DateTime itself has a resolution of 1 tick, which is 100ns. What you probably wanted to say was that Windows.Forms.Timer is not very precise, because it always invokes the handler from a Gui thread, which means it will sometimes have to wait until OS is done doing Gui stuff before it actually calls the handler delegate.

[Rob Philpott]

Quite. But DateTime.Now will give not give you 100ns resolution. More like 15ms.

Regards, Rob Philpott.

[_groo_]

You can create a new background thread with a manual reset event, waiting for a specified amount of seconds or an external Set.

// in your background thread
int msToWait = 5000;

do {

// wait for Start event
manualStartEvent.WaitOne();

Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();
// wait for Pause event, or until time elapses
bool externalSet = manualPauseEvent.WaitOne(msToWait);
sw.Stop();

// check if Paused or elapsed
int actualMsElapsed = sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds;
if (externalSet) // this indicates external set, so time did not elapse
{
msToWait -= actualMsElapsed;
if (msToWait < 0)
msToWait = 0;
}
else // this indicates we're done
{
msToWait = 0;
}

} while (msToWait > 0);

[EDIT] Code is posted only as an idea, you should take care of starting the thread, handling Stop situations and proper disposing all events.

modified on Thursday, April 9, 2009 8:39 AM

[_groo_]

Good point, resolution of the Now property is in ms, and depends on the system. In Vista it seems to have a 1ms resolution, I just tested it:

// a console app
static void Main(string[] args)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(16384);
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
sb.AppendLine(String.Format("{0:HH:mm:ss.ffff}", DateTime.Now));

Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
Console.ReadLine();
}

System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch on the other hand is much more precise:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(16384);
Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.Start();
DateTime now = DateTime.Now;
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
sb.AppendLine(String.Format("{0:HH:mm:ss.fffff}", now + sw.Elapsed));

Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
Console.ReadLine();
}

[Xmen Real]

hmmm nice way...thanks ;)

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[Rob Philpott]

Hey nice, stopwatch is new to me. We have some performance timers in the system I work on, but they use raw API calls via interop to do their stuff. Just tried your first example - the elapse is usually 15ms but sometimes 16ms, so on XP I guess the resolution is 15.something ms.

Regards, Rob Philpott.

[Luc 648011]

It all depends on the available hardware; you may want to look at the article "Timer surprises, and how to avoid them"[^] which predates .NET 2.0 and hence does not mention StopWatch (which is based on PerformanceCounters anyway). :)