>That's the point. In C# you have so many more possibilities than in C++ which makes it harder to find the most efficient way. Of course, you can find a faster way in C# (timeGetTime, high performance counters, Environment.TickCount), or a slower way in VFP. Not that this makes C++ the better choice...

Well that true for anything. You have about a 1000 ways to shoot yourself in the foot in VFP, and in C++ you can write a non-optimized algorithm to do the same.

The bigger a runtime the more choicess there are and the more the performance can vary between different approaches. And as with any language it takes time to understand what works best in most siutations.

I'd argue in normal circumstances the performance differece between DateTime.Now and DateTime.UtcNow is not enough to every worry about 10x faster or not. <g>

It's the overall performance that matters and there's nothing like a good profile run to find the bottlenecks in any application for the issues that really make a difference in getting fixed.