Hi Ray,
There sure is much easier way in .Net to deal with dates - we are talking general dates rather than PI absolute/relative dates.
.Net presents the Datetime object of which there are some handy methods... object.AddMinutes, object.AddSeconds etc. Lookup DateTime object and go from there...
Example:
Dim DT as DateTime = Datetime.Now.AddSeconds(-30) 'Time 30 seconds ago
Dim DT as DateTime = Datetime.Now.AddSeconds(30) 'Time 30 seconds in the future.
Rhys.
Principal Consultant
Real-Time Data Management @ Wipro Technologies