Handling dates, times, and decimal numbers

You might have noted that there are no date/time types built into gRPC. To store these values, you must use well-known type extensions, for example, google.protobuf.Timestamp (equivalent to DateTimeOffset) and google.protobuf.Duration (equivalent to TimeSpan).

To use them as field types in a message, they must be imported, as shown in the following code:

syntax = "proto3";
import "google/protobuf/duration.proto";  
import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";
message Employee {
  int32 employeeId = 1;
  google.protobuf.Timestamp birth_date = 2;
  google.protobuf.Duration earned_vacation_time = 3;
  ...
}

The class generated will not use .NET types directly. Instead, there are intermediate types, as shown in the following code:

public class Employee
{
  public int EmployeeId;
  public Timestamp BirthDate;
  public Duration EarnedVacationTime;
}

There are conversion methods on the types FromDateTimeOffset...