C# Decimal: Literals, Conversions and Formatting

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The C# decimal keyword denotes a 128-bit data type.  Compared to floating-point types, the decimal type has a greater precision and a smaller range, which makes it suitable for financial and monetary calculations.

Approximate Range: ±1.0 × 10−28 to ±7.9 × 1028

Precision:  28-29 significant digits

.NET Type:  System.Decimal

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The Proper Way to Show the Wait Cursor

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It’s common UI courtesy to show the Wait cursor when performing a long operation that requires the user to wait.  Here is how the Wait cursor appears in Windows Vista:

Wait cursor

But developers often go about this the wrong way by setting the Cursor.Current property as follows:

Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;

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Clean/Strip/Remove Binary Characters from C# String

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Sometimes you may need to display or print an input string that contains binary characters.  The following function replaces all binary characters in a string with a blank.  You can easily modify this method to remove other undesirable characters (such as high-ASCII) if needed.

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Blogs from Microsoft C# Development Team

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Want insight into the design and development of C#?  Then check out these blogs by key members of the Microsoft C# development team:

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Close All Forms in an Application in a Thread-Safe Manner

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Closing all forms in an application seems like it would be a simple task of using a foreach loop in the Application.OpenForms collection, such as:

foreach (Form form in Application.OpenForms)
{
    form.Close();
}

But there are two problems.

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C# Read String Line by Line

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It’s easy to read a string one line at a time.  Here is a console program that demonstrates how:

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C# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to String

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It’s fairly easy to convert a C# String to a Stream and vice-versa.

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Clear C# StringBuilder

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Many .NET developers are baffled by the lack of a “Clear” method in the StringBuilder class.  For example, if you are using a StringBuilder in a loop, you may want to clear its contents at the beginning of each loop.

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Determine Windows Version and Edition with C#

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This article explains how to use C# to determine the name, edition, service pack, version and bits of the host operating system.

For example, the results on my PC would be:

Operation System Information
—————————-
Name = Windows Vista
Edition = Home Premium
Service Pack = Service Pack 1
Version = 6.0.6001.65536
Bits = 64

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C# Focus TextBox on Form Load

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When showing a form that contains a TextBox, it’s common courtesy to focus the TextBox so that the user can begin typing immediately.

To focus a TextBox when a Windows Form first loads, simply set the TabIndex for the TextBox to zero (or the lowest TabIndex for any Control on the Form).

When a Form is displayed, it automatically focuses the Control with the lowest TabIndex.  Note that if your TextBox is pre-initialized with some text, then the entire Text will be selected, as shown below:

Entire text is selected

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