DateTime.Parse vs Convert.ToDateTime

Question

Hello

As most of the times I cannot reply to my own threads, in continue of:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1429863/save-and-load-date-and-time

I need to get date and time from a custom date time control and save it into registry, then load it back to the control.

That's the best method to parse the string back to DateTime?

::

What about Convert.ToDateTime(now2) compared to DateTime.Parse?

Convert.ToDateTime seems to work too, but which one is better to avoid possible exceptions?

Thanks all

Answer 1

There's not much difference, you can even see the difference if you decompile the source/lookup the C# reference source online.

The main difference is that is coalesces a null input to a new DateTime(0) (i.e. DateTime.MinValue) which feels a bit wonky to me.

Apart from that the only other difference is that you can't pass DateTimeStyles like you can with DateTime.Parse / DateTime.TryParse so the resulting DateTime will always represent the date in Local time rather than Utc.