<p>I'm having problems deciding on what is the best way is to handle and store time measurements.</p>

<p>I have an app that has a textbox that allows the users to input time in either hh:mm:ss or mm:ss format. </p>

<p>So I was planning on parsing this string, tokenizing it on the colons and creating TimeSpan (or using TimeSpan.Parse() and just adding a "00:" to the mm:ss case) for my business logic. Ok?</p>

<p>How do I store this as in a database though? What would the field type be? DateTime seems wrong. I don't want a time of 00:54:12 to be stored as 1901-01-01 00:54:12 that seems a bit poor?</p>

I think the simplest is to just convert user input into a integer number of seconds. So 54:12 == 3252 seconds, so store the 3252 in your database or wherever. Then when you need to display it to the user, you can convert it back again.