Chaos, confusion and me

If you are anything like me, i.e. has a terrible memory, you might want to keep a recepie of a common task written down somewhere. I find that I frequently forget how to do simple things like declaring custom events properly. And when I need a refresher course I grab a book or surf the Internet only to discover extremly verbose examples and explanations to simple solutions. In order to speed up recovery of forgotten knowledge I’ve decided to make my blog a How-To repository. Here I record solutions and programming practices that I wish to be able to recall quickly. The intent is to adress the basics and keep it brief. Although I will include some explanations and thereby taking a risk of being that which I rally against - verbose.

Since this is supposed to be a post in the How-To section I must include some code. For some reason the basic value types in C# lack methods to check if an object can be interpreted as such a value. I.e. can a string be interpreted as a date? Here I’ll present a simple representation of an IsDate() function that returns true if the submitted object’s value can be interpreted as a date. This code can be adapted to int, decimal and other types quite easily.

public bool IsDate(object o)
{
    try
    {
        DateTime date = DateTime.Parse(o.ToString());
        return true;
    }
    catch
    {
        return false;
    }
}

Technorati Tags: How-To, C#

Posted by Edward on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 20:19:37.