What’s wrong with this ?

From a long list of things I’m amazed I didn’t see more quickly.

Summary

Do you sometimes find you go looking for a difficult problem when what you have is a simple problem ?

Todays Learning Point

Todays learning point is : if something weird is happening look at the simple things first.

 private bool _blnShowContractTabs;
 public bool blnShowContractTabs
 {
 get { return _blnShowContractTabs; }
 set { _blnShowContractTabs = value; }
 }

 private bool _blnShowAddEditLinks;
 public bool blnShowAddEditLinks
 {
 get { return _blnShowAddEditLinks; }
 set { _blnShowContractTabs = value; }
 }

I spent a little while today looking for a “big problem” which turned out to be a carelessly typed property set statement (… carelessly typed by me … I should add).

Zen ?

I was listening to the This Developers Life podcast the other day and Michael Moore spoke about problem solving and times when your problem isn’t really a problem at all (he expressed it much better than I could). I thought about Michael when I found this one !

Hex to Decimal in C#

Two alternate ways of converting a hex string to decimal

Summary

The other day I needed to write some code to convert an integer expressed in hexadecimal to decimal. I was surprised to find that the way to do it wasn’t the way I expected.

The value I was processing had come from a different environment and had a ‘0x’ prefix to define its base – it was also a string. I just assumed i could feed this to int.Parse and I’d get the answer I was after.

In fact it seems that you either have to get rid of the ‘0x’ prefix or find some other way of doing it. I write a little program to illustrate the choices.

AllowHexSpecifier Weirdness

One thing to notice here which is really quite strange is that the int.Parse option takes an enumerated type argument System.Globalization.NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier when in fact it doesn’t allow a Hex specifier ! I’m sure there’s some sense to that but I don’t see it myself !

Example Code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Globalization;

namespace HexParsing
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            string strTestHex ;
            int iTestHex;
            string sOut;
            string s1 = "{0} converted to base 10 using int.Parse is {1}";
            string s2 = "{0} converted to base 10 using Convert.ToInt32 is {1}";

            //Without a prefix - using int.Parse
            strTestHex = "7FC3DAE0";
            iTestHex = int.Parse(   strTestHex,
                                    System.Globalization.NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier,
                                    CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
            sOut = String.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, s1, strTestHex, iTestHex);
            Console.WriteLine(sOut);

            //With a prefix - using Convert.ToInt32
            strTestHex = "0x7FC3DAE0";
            iTestHex = Convert.ToInt32(strTestHex,16);
            sOut = String.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, s2, strTestHex, iTestHex);
            Console.WriteLine(sOut);

            Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to close window");
            Console.ReadLine();

        }
    }
}