Each business applications developer spends a lot of the time working with strings. Strings are everywhere and we do not avoid that, but we can make our life simpler. How many times each day do you use String.Format(), String.Trim() or String.IsNullOrEmpty()? This are of course very helpful method but turned out that in my case they do not provide a functionality I require. I found out that almost all the time I am treating null, an empty string and a string with whitespaces only as the same “undefined/unkown” value. I am doing that mostly with strings received from outside of my applications where I an interested in “real values” instead of for instance a string with spaces only. In this case, methods mentioned above do not meet my needs. Because of that I have created replacement for them as an extension methods and they became my favorite tools to work with strings (I am using them everywhere instead of out of the box methods).
StringExtensions class defining extension methods:
using System;
namespace ByteCarrot.Shared.Infrastructure
{
public static class StringExtensions
{
public static string NullTrim(this string s)
{
if (s == null)
{
return null;
}
s = s.Trim();
return s == String.Empty ? null : s;
}
public static bool IsSet(this string s)
{
return s.NullTrim() != null;
}
public static string AsFormat(
this string s, params object[] args)
{
return String.Format(s, args);
}
}
}
IsSet() extension method – returns true only if string contains at least one “printable” character:
if (!this.Commands.IsSet())
{
this.Logger.LogError("Commands not specified.");
}
NullTrim() extension method – returns string trimmed from both sides and null when base string was null or after trimming turned out that output is an empty string:
var commands = this.Commands.NullTrim();
AsFormat() extension method – shorter replacement for System.String:
Resources.RequiredField.AsFormat("First name");
It is nothing fancy but make my life easier.
Since some time I have had a feeling that I should turn my eyes in direction other than .NET and technologies connected to it. Maybe not as a new path of career, because I have invested a lot of time to get to the point where I am now, but as something additional what can give me some new perspective and help to become a better developer. Because I cannot learn all available technologies I had to choose one and only one of them. After reading some blogs and mostly because of Jeremy D. Miller’s opinion my choice fell on Ruby and the Rails. So many developers are excited about this technology, I decided to find out what is a source of theirs excitement.
