Hi! First off, your book is really great. Its definitely helping me learn and its not boring me. Thank you for authoring this book.

Ok, so I'm referring to Chapter5: Understanding Reference Data Types and I got confused with the first topic with String Variables. You said that data entered in the textbox is textual data. Does this mean that I ALWAYS have to use the TryParse method so that I can use this textual data (which is in fact a numerical data), into mathematical manipulation? Does this mean that I can't skip the input verification process ("flag = int....")?

In other words, is there no way that I can straight away assign the inputed data to a variable aside from the TryParse method?

I'm confused as I am new to programming. Please help.

You are correct in that all data entered into a textbox is string data. As such, it cannot be manipulated directly as numeric data. You must use a conversion method to change the data in the textbox to a numeric.

There are alternatives. For example, you could use int.Parse() to perform the conversion of the text data to an integer. That the good news. The bad news is when the user enters non-numeric data, the code could throw an exception and crash your program. (Exceptions are covered in Chatper 11.) The TryParse() method, however, prevents most exceptions and is safer than the simple Parse() method. (That's why I introduced it in Chapter 6, because I didn't want to get into exception handling until later.)

I hope this answers your question.

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Jack Purdum, Ph.D.
Author: Beginning C# 3.0: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming (and 14 other programming texts)

Question was answered clearly. Thank you very much. I am just too excited to learn and can't wait for the following chapters. But yeah, it answered my question clearly.

Thanks a lot!