How to set time to midnight for current day?

Every time that I create a non-nullable datetime in my mvc3 application it defaults to now(), where now is current date with current time. I would like to default it to today's date with 12am as the time.

I'm trying to default the time in my mvc...but...the following isn't setting to todays date @12am. Instead it defaults to now with current date and time.

private DateTime _Begin = new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month, DateTime.Now.Day, 12, 0, 0);
public DateTime Begin { get { return _Begin; } set { _Begin = value; } } 

How can I set to 12am for the current date for non-nullable datetime?

You can use the Date property of the DateTime object - eg

DateTime midnight = DateTime.Now.Date;

So your code example becomes

private DateTime _Begin = DateTime.Now.Date;
public DateTime Begin { get { return _Begin; } set { _Begin = value; } }

PS. going back to your original code setting the hours to 12 will give you time of noon for the current day, so instead you could have used 0...

var now = DateTime.Now;
new DateTime(now.Year, now.Month, now.Day, 0, 0, 0);

I believe you are looking for DateTime.Today. The documentation states:

>An object that is set to today's date, with the time component set to 00:00:00.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.today.aspx

Your code would be

DateTime _Begin = DateTime.Today;

Using some of the above recommendations, the following function and code is working for search a date range:

Set date with the time component set to 00:00:00

public static DateTime GetDateZeroTime(DateTime date)
{
    return new DateTime(date.Year, date.Month, date.Day, 0, 0, 0);
}

Usage

var modifieddatebegin = Tools.Utilities.GetDateZeroTime(form.modifieddatebegin);

var modifieddateend = Tools.Utilities.GetDateZeroTime(form.modifieddateend.AddDays(1));

Only need to set it to

DateTime.Now.Date

Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.Date.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"));
Console.Read();

It shows

>"2017-04-08 00:00:00"

on my machine.

Related, so I thought I would post for others. If you want to find the UTC of the start of today (for your timezone) the following code works for any UTC offset (-23.5 thru +23.5). This looks like we add X hours then subtract X hours, but the important thing is the ".Date" after the add.

double utcOffset= 10.0;  // Set to your UTC offset in hours (eg. Melbourne Australia)
var now = DateTime.UtcNow;

var startOfToday = now.AddHours(utcOffset - 24.0).Date;
startOfToday = startOfToday.AddHours(24.0 - utcOffset);

Most of the suggested solutions can cause a 1 day error depending on the time associated with each date. If you are looking for an integer number of calendar days between to dates, regardless of the time associated with each date, I have found that this works well:

return (dateOne.Value.Date - dateTwo.Value.Date).Days;

Try this:

DateTime Date = DateTime.Now.AddHours(-DateTime.Now.Hour).AddMinutes(-DateTime.Now.Minute)
   .AddSeconds(-DateTime.Now.Second);

Output will be like:

>07/29/2015 00:00:00