Consider the following 2 scenarios: Scenario 1). Today is May 1st 2012, and Scenario 2). Today is September 1st 2012.
Now, consider that we write on our webpage the following about a comment someone has left: "This comment was written 3 months and 12 days ago". The amount of days in both these scenarios will ALWAYS be different even though the statement is exactly the same. In Scenario 1, "3 months and 12 days" would equal 102 days. However, in Scenario 2, "3 months and 12 days" would be 104 days!
Now, to corner in on my point, lets use a different example and say that someone left a comment on our site on Jan 30th 2013, and today is March 10th 2013. Our real TimeSpan object needs to know this relative date, and can figure out the following:
- That there is 10 days in March,
- That there is 1 day in Jan (counting from 30th to 31st).
- That the month Feb is one month regardless of how many days there are in it (even though it's 28 days).
So, it would mean 10 days + 1 day + 1 month total, translating to This comment was posted 1 Month and 11 Days ago.
Now, if you used the MS style TimeSpan object (or any TimeSpan object in any language), it would give you the number of days from 30th Jan to 10 March (39 days), and because the TimeSpan object doesn't store relative date (the base/initial date we subtracted to get the TimeSpan), if you asked it how many months and days it has been, it will assume there is 30 days in one month, or even worst, the average which is greater than 30 days, and return the rest in days, so to get to 39 days, it will tell you it's been 1 Month and 9 Days and you will get the This comment was posted 1 Month and 9 Days ago message. Remember, both these scenarios have the same start date and same current/end date, yes the Microsoft TimeSpan object, by not allowing us to tell it the month of Feb 2013 should be considered, has given