• Introduction
• Overview
• Why does Noda Time exist?
• Installation
• Core
• Core concepts
• Choosing (and converting) between types
• Core types quick reference
• Design philosophy and conventions
• Text
• Text handling
• Patterns for Offset values
• Patterns for Instant values
• Patterns for LocalTime values
• Patterns for LocalDate values
• Patterns for LocalDateTime values
• Patterns for Period values
• Advanced
• Date and time arithmetic
• BCL conversions
• Serialization
• Threading
• Library
• Unit testing with Noda Time
• Updating the time zone database
• Mono support
• Limitations of Noda Time
• Current roadmap
• Version history

Installation

Our primary distribution channel is NuGet with two packages:

• NodaTime
• NodaTime.Testing

An experimental assembly to support Json.NET is also available (in source form only); see the serialization guide for more information.

See the "Building and testing" section in the developer guide for instructions on building Noda Time from source.

System requirements

From release 1.1 onwards, there are two builds of Noda Time: the desktop version and the Portable Class Library version.

The desktop version requires .NET 3.5 (client profile). This build also supports Mono, with some caveats.

The PCL build is configured to support:

• .NET Framework 4 and higher
• Silverlight 4 and higher
• Windows Phone 7 and higher
• .NET for Windows Store apps

Noda Time does not support XBox 360 or Silverlight 3, and it's unlikely that we'd ever want to introduce support for these. (It's more likely that over time, we'll drop support for Silverlight - but not imminently, of course.) See the limitations page for differences between the PCL build and the desktop build.

Package contents and getting started

Everything you need to use Noda Time is contained in the NodaTime package. The NodaTime.Testing package is designed for testing code which uses Noda Time. See the testing guide for more information. It is expected that production code will only refer to the NodaTime.dll assembly, and that's all that's required at execution time. This assembly includes the TZDB database as an embedded resource.

Everything within the NodaTime assembly is in the NodaTime namespace or a "child" namespace. After adding a reference to the main assembly (either directly via the file system or with NuGet) and including an appropriate using directive, you should be able to start using Noda Time immediately, with no further effort.

Debugging

As of version 1.1, the source code of Noda Time is published to SymbolSource. You can configure Visual Studio to automatically fetch the source code if you need to step into it when debugging your application. It takes a little bit of setup, but there are full instructions on the SymbolSource web site. (The instructions aren't specific to Noda Time, so if you're already using SymbolSource as one of your symbol servers, you just need to make sure you're not excluding Noda Time from the list of modules to fetch.)

If you believe you've found a bug in Noda Time, using the SymbolSource version is likely to prove painful after a while - it's much better to just fetch the source code and build your own copy locally.