Using Dates and Times in Protobuf

Any programming language can work with dates and times. Protobuf can do it too with the help of one of its built-in packages. Dates and times can be handled by the Timestamp type and durations can be handled by the Duration type. These are roughly equivalent to the DateTime and TimeSpan types from C#.

In this lesson, we'll learn how to use both data types. We'll learn how to read and write into a Timespan field from C# code. We'll also learn how to use the Duration type as the difference between two Timestamp values.

Enabling Timestamp and Duration in Protobuf

The following code widget contains the code that we'll be making our changes to. This represents the complete setup we've built previously.