The future of C# and Visual Basic [video]

Re:The future of C# and Visual Basic [video] by danbruc on Monday November 03, 2014 @12:06PM (#8551908)

That doesn't work for a standard library - it may make you happy, but the next developer may have very different needs. Int32.TryParse() does not distinguish between null and empty strings and it takes only a minute or two to create an extension method and the problem is solved once and forever.

  public static class StringExtensions
  {
     public static Int32? ParseAsNullableInt32(this String self, Int32? fallback = null)
     {
        Int32 result;
        return Int32.TryParse(self, out result) ? result : fallback;
     }
  }

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Re:The future of C# and Visual Basic [video] by Pxtl on Monday November 03, 2014 @12:55PM (#8552253)

Yes, that's the obviously implementation, but so many older framework libs that have not been replaced still use serializers that, when given a Nullable type, fail to use that obvious implementation and blow up on empty strings.

In the case of the XML Serializer, that means that if I declare a class with Nullable<int> Foo {get;set;}

and

    <Foo />

appears in the XML body, then it blows up. The WebForms stuff is similarly pathetic about empty strings. There is no useful distinction between empty strings and nulls when we're talking about dates or numbers or something like that, so throwing an exception in this case is just plain wrong. It's not even protecting backwards compatibility because pre-2.0 C# didn't even have nullable ints.

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