In this sixth installment of C# Basics, I want to share a brief snippet of an extension method I’ve found useful that will introduce you to QDD as well. Quick and Dirty Design (QDD) is my name for having multiple tiny console application projects lying around in which I test little code snippets before putting them into something more serious. This is only necessary in projects in which TDD has not been used and no testing framework or tests are available for whatever reason.

But back to extension methods. From MSDN we learn:

“Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type. For client code written in C# and Visual Basic, there is no apparent difference between calling an extension method and the methods that are actually defined in a type.”

As the MSDN article points out, the most common extension methods you may run into are the LINQ standard query operations. But don’t let that stop you from providing yourself with some very nice little extension methods like this one:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace IOTest
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      string phone1 = @"8015551212";
      string phone2 = @"(8a0d1d)d d5d5d5d-d1d2d1d2";

      if (phone1.StripNonNumeric() == phone2.StripNonNumeric())
        Console.WriteLine("true");
      else
        Console.WriteLine("false");

      Console.ReadLine();
    }
  }

  static class Ext
  {
    private static Regex nonNum = new Regex(@"[^0-9]");

    public static string StripNonNumeric(this string item)
    {
      return nonNum.Replace(item, string.Empty);
    }
  }
}