C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Simple types are value types that are a subset of the built-in types in C#, although, in fact, the types are defined as part of the .NET Framework Class Library (.NET FCL). Simple types are made up of several numeric types and a bool typ...

String usage abounds in just about all types of applications. The System.String type does not derive from System.ValueType and is therefore considered a reference type. The string alias is built into C# and can be used instead of the ful...

Structures, like any other value type, implicitly inherit from System.ValueType. At first glance, a structure is similar to a class but is actually very different. Knowing when to use a structure over a class will help tremendously when...

A long-awaited feature, generics, is finally here with the advent of Version 2.0 of the C# compiler. Generics is an extremely useful feature that allows you to write less, but more efficient, code. This aspect of generics is detailed mor...

Collections are groups of items; in .NET, collections contain objects (including boxed value types). Each object contained in a collection is called an element. Some collections contain a straightforward list of elements, while others (d...

Two of the four main new features in C# 2.0 are iterators and partial types. Iterators allow for a block of code to yield an ordered sequence of values. Partial types allow for different parts of classes to be placed in different locatio...

This chapter contains recipes covering the exception-handling mechanism, including the try, catch, and finally blocks. Along with these recipes are others covering the mechanisms used to throw exceptions manually from within your code. T...

The FCL contains many classes to obtain diagnostic information about your application, as well as the environment it is running in. In fact, there are so many classes that a namespace, System.Diagnostics, was created to contain all of th...

Delegates contain all that is needed to allow a method, with a specific signature and return type, to be invoked by your code. A delegate can be passed to methods and a reference to it can be stored in a structure or class. A delegate is...

The .NET Framework Class Library includes the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace, which is devoted to creating, executing, and obtaining results from regular expressions executed against a string. Regular expressions take the form...

In this chapter, you will look at certain data structures and algorithms that are not available for you in the FCL through Version 2.0. Examples are provided for algorithms like hash-code creation and string balancing. The FCL does not s...

This chapter deals with the filesystem in four distinct ways. The first set of recipes looks at typical file interactions like: CreationReading and writingDeletionAttributesEncoding methods for character dataSelecting the correct way (ba...

Reflection is the mechanism provided by the .NET Framework to allow you to inspect how a program is constructed. Using reflection, you can obtain information such as the name of an assembly and what other assemblies a given assembly impo...

The World Wide Web has worked its way into every nook and cranny of what most .NET developers encounter when building their solutions today. Web services are on the rise, and ASP.NET is one of the main players in the web application spac...

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, portable, and flexible way to represent data in a structured format. XML is used in a myriad of ways, from acting as the foundation of web-based messaging protocols such as SOAP, to being one...

.NET provides many classes to help make network programming easier than many environments that preceded it. There is a great deal of functionality to assist you with tasks like: Building network-aware applicationsDownloading files via FT...

There are many ways to secure different parts of your application. The security of running code in .NET revolves around the concept of Code Access Security (CAS). CAS determines the trustworthiness of an assembly based upon its origin an...

A thread represents a single flow of execution logic in a program. Some programs never need more than a single thread to execute efficiently, but many do, and that is what this chapter is about. Threading in .NET allows you to build resp...

Visual C# .NET allows you to step outside of the safe environment of managed code and write code that is considered "unsafe" by the CLR. Running unsafe code presents a certain set of restrictions in exchange for opening up possibilities...

Every programmer has a certain set of, routines that he refers back to and uses over and over again. These utility functions are usually bits of code that are not provided by any particular language or framework. This chapter is a compil...