Step-by-step tutorial 

This tutorial will guide you through preparation steps for the script (SynTime.cs) which gets time from US Naval Observatory Time Server (http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl) and synchronises the PC clock. 

This tutorial demonstrates how to: 

• retrieve content of a WEB page 
• perform simple text file manipulations 
• invoke WIN32 API functions from C# code 
  
  

NOTE: Only the important code fragments from SynTime.cs will be discussed here. 

1. By using any text editor (eg. Notepad.exe) create file SynTime.cs that contains the code form Tutorial/synTime.cs script or just copy the whole the script file.
2. Open command prompt. Make sure current directory is the directory where SynTime.cs is located. 
3. Execute the following command in command-prompt:
   
   cscs synTime
   If your proxy server requires authentication (quite usual for corporate networks), provide the user name and password as command-line parameters (e.g. user - "bart" and password "carramba"):
   
   cscs synTime bart:carramba

Output 

The script will produce the output similar to one below:

Code discussion 

The main method in the script is GetHTML(...). It downloads and returns the content of a web page, which is specified as the "url" method parameter. The GlobalProxySelection is adjusted with provided credentials if proxy authentication is requested. 

static string GetHTML(string url, string proxyUser, string proxyPw) {     StringBuilder sb  = new StringBuilder();     byte[] buf = new byte[8192];     HttpWebRequest  request  = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);     if (proxyUser != null)     {         GlobalProxySelection.Select.Credentials =                          new NetworkCredential(proxyUser, proxyPw);     }     HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();     Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();     string tempString = null;     int count = 0;     while (0 < (count = resStream.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length)))     {         tempString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buf, 0, count);         sb.Append(tempString);     }     return sb.ToString(); }

The WEB page line, which contains "UTC" time is extracted and converted in the DateTime.

.... //strMyDateTime is something like: Oct. 08, 04:13:14 UTC strMyDateTime = strMyDateTime.Insert(strMyDateTime.IndexOf(",") + 1, GetCurrentYear() + ","); CultureInfo en = new CultureInfo("en-US"); DateTime myDateTime = DateTime.Parse(strMyDateTime, en); ...

 

After that DateTime is converted to native WIN32 SYSTEMTIME structure and the system clock are adjusted with new time.

.... [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError=true)] static extern int SetSystemTime(ref SYSTEMTIME lpSystemTime); ... SYSTEMTIME st = new SYSTEMTIME(dateTime); SetSystemTime(ref st); ...

See Also

CS-Script tutorials