datediff help in vb.net - vb.net

Question

Hey all i have 2 dates that i need to see the days that are different.
Problem being is that the server date is not in the normal MM/DD/YYYY format. It is in the format YYYYMMDD.
I've tried the following:
Dim curDate As Date = Format(Now, "yyyyMMdd")
Dim srDate As Date = dr(6)
Dim M As Long = DateDiff(DateInterval.Weekday, curDate, srDate)
The curDate has the error of:
Conversion from string "20110325" to type 'Date' is not valid.
Any help would be great! :o)
David

Answer 1

Try not to hammer a square string peg into a round date hole, that just has way too many ways to break your mallet. The Now function already returns a date:
Dim curDate As Date = Now.Date
Option Strict On at the top of the source code file helps you find these kinds of mistakes.
If you get the string from the server (pray you don't) then use ParseExact() to convert the date:
Dim curDate As Date = Date.ParseExact(serverValue, "yyyyMMdd", Nothing)

Answer 2

Why are you formatting Now like that? You could just do this:
Dim curDate As Date = DateTime.Now.Date

Answer 3

As the other posters have said, you don't need to format DateTime.Now.
But there's something else going wrong here: Format returns a string, and you're trying to assign that to a Date. It's trying to implicitly convert a string, and failing.
In future, when you do have a date-string like "yyyyMMdd" to turn into a DateTime type, use DateTime.Parse

Answer 4

Your problem is the first line; it seems you have Option Strict off in your project (FOR SHAME!), as it would otherwise not compile at all.
Format(Now, "yyyyMMdd") will produce the current date formatted in that manner as a string. The trouble is that you're attempting to assign that output (the string) to a Date variable. Because you have Option Strict off, the compiler indicates this conversion implicitly, and the runtime is attempting to convert your non-standard date string back into a date. This is what's failing.
Changing as little as possible about your code, it should read:
Dim curDate As Date = Now.Date
Dim srDate As Date = DateTime.ParseExact(dr(6).ToString(), "yyyyMMDD", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).Date
Dim M As Long = DateDiff(DateInterval.Weekday, curDate, srDate)
Step 0: TURN OPTION STRICT ON
There's no reason that new code should be written with this option turned off. There's too much potential for runtime errors that are easily caught at compile time (like this one) with it off. It's a feature that should be banished from the language entirely.
Step 1: Adopt standard .NET types and functions
While this isn't required, it will make your code more readable to other developers and other developers' code more readable to you. Things like Format, DateDiff, Now, etc. are all VB-specific functions that exist primarily to make it easier for classic VB6 applications to be ported over to .NET. Unless there's a particular reason to use the language-specific versions, it's a good idea to use standard .NET functions instead.

Answer 5

Firstly:
"MM/DD/YYYY" is not normal in most of the world, only North America.
China uses "YYYY-MM-DD".
Europe uses "DD/MM/YYYY"
Secondly, if you are parsing a known date format, you can pass a format string to DateTime.Parse. In your case that is what you need to do.

Answer 6

Try
Dim curDate As Date = Now
Dim srDate As Date = mid(dr(6),5,2) & "/" & right(dr(6),2) & "/" & left(dr(6),4)