One of my favorite features in Microsoft .NET is extension methods, primarily because of the clean syntax they provide for formatting and perform special operations against types.  I never really never did like static helper methods like this:

DecimalHelper.FormatAsMoney(decimalValue);

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I just felt that this was not clean and felt more procedural then it should in an object oriented language like .NET.  Nonetheless, it satisfied the need of being able to centralize logic for dealing with certain common conditions, least of all Type conversion (ala the Convert class).  With the advent of the LINQ syntax in .NET 3.5 Microsoft provided support for using extension methods.  These superficially attached methods are my favorite feature in .NET as they are able to achieve the same result as the helper methods above, except with a much cleaner syntax in my opinion:

decimalVaue.AsMoney();

So I started thinking, this would be very useful for creating “smart parsers” for converting types, in particular strings to various data types, a common and often tedious exercise in web applications.  Smart parsers encapsulate the calls to TryParse and allow the method call to return a standard value on fail or, with an overload, return a default value.  This is an example of my AsInt smart parser function:

public static int AsInt(this string s)
{
    int d;
    return !int.TryParse(s, out d)
        ? int.MinValue : d;
}

public static int AsInt(this string s, int defValue)
{
    int d = s.AsInt();
    return d == int.MinValue
        ? defValue : d;
}

I always did hate calls to Convert and TryParse cause I felt the code was dirty and parsing in general sometimes needs to aware of Globalization settings.  As a result of the success I have had using this on many enterprise projects, I have made it a standard that I implement.  I decided recently, at the advisement of a co-worker to publish something. Its not much, but its a few of the standard methods that I work with.  A lot of these sort of methods are born out of a need to create consistency in the application, mostly related to formatting.

Below is the link to download what I currently have developed (along with some unit tests).  I hope to have this grow into a full fledged type conversion and formatting library.

http://cid-18f9d8896416d2fb.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/BlogFiles/Core.Extensions.zip

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