Practicing and exploring

Test your knowledge and understanding by answering some questions, getting some hands-on practice, and exploring the topics covered in this chapter with deeper research.

Exercise 2.1 – Test your knowledge

To get the best answer to some of these questions, you will need to do your own research. I want you to “think outside the book,” so I have deliberately not provided all the answers in the book.

I want to encourage you to get into the good habit of looking for help elsewhere, following the principle of “teach a person to fish.”

1. What statement can you type in a C# file to discover the compiler and language version?
2. What are the two types of comments in C#?
3. What is the difference between a verbatim string and an interpolated string?
4. Why should you be careful when using float and double values?
5. How can you determine how many bytes a type like double uses in memory?
6. When should you use the var keyword?
7. What is the newest syntax to create an instance of a class like XmlDocument?
8. Why should you be careful when using the dynamic type?
9. How do you right-align a format string?
10. What character separates arguments for a console app?

Exercise 2.2 – Test your knowledge of number types

What type would you choose for the following “numbers”?

• A person’s telephone number
• A person’s height
• A person’s age
• A person’s salary
• A book’s ISBN
• A book’s price
• A book’s shipping weight
• A country’s population
• The number of stars in the universe
• The number of employees in each of the small or medium businesses in the UK (up to about 50,000 employees per business)

Exercise 2.3 – Practice number sizes and ranges

In the Chapter02 solution, create a console app project named Ch02Ex03Numbers that outputs the number of bytes in memory that each of the following number types uses and the minimum and maximum values they can have: sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, Int128, UInt128, Half, float, double, and decimal.

The result of running your console app should look something like Figure 2.14:

Figure 2.14: The result of outputting number type sizes

Code solutions for all exercises are available to download or clone from the GitHub repository at the following link: https://github.com/markjprice/cs12dotnet8.

Exercise 2.4 – Explore topics

Use the links on the following page to learn more details about the topics covered in this chapter:

https://github.com/markjprice/cs12dotnet8/blob/main/docs/book-links.md#chapter-2---speaking-c

Exercise 2.5 – Explore Spectre

No, not the villainous organization from the James Bond films! Spectre is a package that enhances console apps. You can read about it at the following link: https://spectreconsole.net/.