Extensions are classes that extend the built-in classes in .NET like “string”, “object”, or “Dictionary”. I have created a large amount of extension methods that help reduce the amount of code needed to perform special tasks.
Some of the extension capabilities provided are:
- String to number, boolean, and time conversions
- Formatting, and repetition
- Standardization of keywords
- Escaping of strings to handle hard whitespace
- Faster regular expression usage of matching and splitting
- Bit arithmetic
- Macro resolution of strings by using dictionaries
- Filtering of dictionary lists
- Exception enhancements
- XML Serialization
- Adding object properties to dictionaries
- Dumping dictionaries to a string
- Collection sorting, searching, and iteration
Some of these capabilities have been described in blog posts.