timing a game in c#

Although JSOP says not to use Timers, at the risk of being down voted I suggest them... It is quite simple.

Create your timer and set up the update interval (how often the UI needs to be updated) and then start the timer. Also store the start time so you can keep calculating the elapsed time;

 Timer _timer;
const int UPDATE_TIME_MS = 1000;//Updates every second
DateTime _startTime;
TimeSpan _elapsedTime;
 ...

 private StartMonitoringTime()
{
    _timer = new System.Timers.Timer(UPDATE_TIME_MS);
    _timer.Elapsed += Timer_Elapsed;
    _startTime = DateTime.Now;
    _timer.Start();
}

...
private void Timer_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    _elapsedTime = DateTime.Now - _startTime;
    //Finally you expse the _elapsedTime to your UI (via binding or whatever)
}

Good afternoon!

The easiest way would be to use a timespan (see link). Basically, you'll set a datetime object when you start playing, and at intervals calculate the timespan between the current time and the start time.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timespan.aspx[^]

Regarding solution 1 above, I agree 100% on the background worker over the timer. Just remember that it's not on the UI thread, so there's a good bit more overhead.

You can use a timer, but remember they're not that terribly accurate, and the calculations would be on the UI thread. What you're trying to do here isn't that much, but if you're running alot off the UI thread, it's going to add up and affect performance.

To summarize, if you can, use a background worker (or even just a new system.threading.thread) unless you really need to.

Good luck, and let us know if there's anything else we can do to help.