Platform and frame-rate independent animation

Hi!

I've come to a point in my Windows.Forms/GLControl game where I want to consider how to measure/control time.

I can't find any examples of how to measure time in the WinForms examples so I ask the
question here:

What is the most popular way of measuring time between Application.Idle events in a Windows.Forms project?

Of course, it has to be platform independent! Otherwise I could just p/invoke windows' builtin QueryPerformanceCounter which I've found good enough so far on the windows platform.

I can see two simple, non-working, solutions:
1. DateTime.Now
2. Timer control

1) My experience of DateTime.Now is that it has big granularity (on the scale of 10 ms, even going BACKWARDS every now and then!) which is not so good for a realtime game.

2) The other method I can think of is using a Timer control, and just assume that whenever the timer.Tick event occur the specified time has passed, something that is not very reliable either in my experience, especially if the ticks-per-second approach 60-100 (typical frame rate of desktops nowadays).

Here is my Application.Idle event handler so far:

void Application_Idle(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  double deltaTimeMS = 10; // TODO: better time measurement
  game.Tick(deltaTimeMS);
  glControl.Invalidate();
}