A Guided Garden Stroll through the .NET Framework Class Library

Namespace: SYSTEM

● I am the SYSTEM Namespace and I am the root Namespace for all of the .NET Framework fundamental Types.

Even if you were to write the most simple "Hello World" computer application using .NET, you will be accessing me whether you realize it or not.

I rule.

The most widely used and famous type within my root SYSTEM Namespace is something called OBJECT. Everything in a .NET computer program ultimately inherits from this base class.

I also contain some basic VALUE and REFERENCE types which include:

• The Integers
• The Floating Point types
• The Boolean type
• The String type

and others.

I actually contain around 100 other classes in my root level, some of which I’m sure any programmer will find quite useful. I will mention just a few of the more useful classes, and why you might want to use them:

System.Array* defines and creates arrays and carries some very useful built-in methods.

Type "System.Array" followed by a dot in Visual Studio and useful methods like Copy, Clone, Clear, BinarySearch*, Sort* and Reverse* will appear after it. You will also find that GetLength, GetUpperBound are quite helpful for determining the size of your array.

In short, this means: no more writing code for copying all or a portion of your array. And you don’t have to write code to find particular elements in an array any more, just use IndexOf or the Sort and BinarySearch combination.

System.Convert with its set of "To" members, allows you to convert one data type to another, such as converting a Double Precision Floating Point variable into an Integer using the "ToInt32" method.

System.Math contains many mathematical functions such as:

• Abs for absolute values
• Trig functions for determining Sine, Cosine, Tangent, etc.
• Logarithmic functions
• Min and Max functions
• Round for rounding numbers
• E and PI ( ∏ ) constants
• Exception* Classes for catching errors, such as ApplicationException
• System.Random for random number generation
• System.Type for determining object types at runtime

A host of Interfaces such as IComparable* which allows you to easily sort your own custom collection of business objects.

Some Enumerations like System.DayOfWeek which is a list of all the days in the week.

And we can’t ignore the System.DateTime* class which has tons of highly useful methods for adding, converting and displaying dates and times.