P3.NET

Creating a Money Type

16 February 2015
Categories: C#

.NET does not have a type to represent monetary values. In general you will simply use Decimal as it has the necessary accuracy. This has some limitations though:

  • Without looking at surrounding code it is difficult to tell if a variable represents money or simply a large decimal value
  • Currency information is not part of the type so it is possible to incorrectly mix monetary values in systems that support multiple currencies at once
  • Displaying money requires that you use a format string to indicate the currency

There have been many implementations of money in .NET. This is my version. Please note that this code is new so bugs may exist. Additionally I’ve taken the requirements and implementation from my own needs. Your needs may differ so you may need to modify the code to behave differently for your applications.

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 6

3 January 2015
Categories: ADO.NET, C#, Data Access

Time to finish up the series on simplifying data access using ADO.NET. We have simplified everything around ADO.NET except for actually retrieving the results. This is probably the most complicated part of ADO.NET given the need for cleaning up the reader, enumerating the results and reading the actual data. We can simplify all this logic down to a single line (plus any action to take for each row).

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 4

22 November 2014
Categories: ADO.NET, C#

This is a continuation of a series on simplifying the use of ADO.NET. In the last article we added the ability to cleanly separate query definition from the underlying data provider. But we left out parameters which are generally critical (and specific) to ADO.NET providers. In this article we will add support for parameters and add a fluent interface to make it easy to use.

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 3

1 November 2014
Categories: ADO.NET, C#

In part 3 of this series on simplifying ADO.NET data access we will finally switch gears and start providing a cleaner approach. Under the hood we will continue to use ADO.NET but it will be wrapped in a provider-agnostic layer that doesn’t require any of the boilerplate code that we are used to seeing with ADO.NET.

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 2

13 October 2014
Categories: ADO.NET, C#

Part 2 of a series on simplifying ADO.NET code.

In the previous article we talked about the basics of ADO.NET. There are times where ADO.NET is still the correct choice for data access. Unfortunately it was written back in the original days of .NET and hasn’t been updated with newer features like generics. In this article we will update the ADO.NET types to make them easier to use. This is a stepping stone to simplifying the overall data access process.

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