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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:38:34+00:00

Does anyone know why Microsoft does not ship a numeric text box with its

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Does anyone know why Microsoft does not ship a numeric text box with its .NET framework e.g. a text box which would ensure that the characters entered are always a valid number? It’s something which is commonly used across applications of different flavours and indeed something which most GUI libraries (well, those that I know) deliver in some way. While it’s not that difficult to write your own, it’s not trivial either.

So, I’m interested in finding out if anyone can rationalise this omission.

edit: Thanks for the suggestions. Whilst masked text boxes and numeric up-downs have their place; I am interested in a control that looks like a text box but automatically performs validation on key press that the input corresponds to a valid number. In my (admittedly limited) experience, this is something which is used quite a bit (we don’t always want the static constraints imposed by masked text boxes, just as we don’t always want the up-down controls at the side).

There are lots of implementations with varying degrees of quality of this on the net and indeed there’s even an example of this on the MSDN.

edit2: Thanks guys, so it sounds like the numeric up-down is the .NET control to use for numeric input only (and the reason why we don’t actually have an explicit numeric text box control). It would have been great if it automatically disallowed the input of non-numeric characters (on keypress, on paste etc) but I guess it’s good enough that it performs the validation when the control loses focus. And, one could do the on keypress, on paste validation if one were really keen…

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  1. I second Garry Shutlers recommendation of using NumericUpDown. You might not like the up-down-controls, but that is the standard look of a numeric entry control in Windows, and you should think twice about using a different look.

    If you end up coding your own implementation (or finding one on the web), there are some pitfalls to look out for. Remember that there are many ways for a value to get into a control besides keypresses. The one in your link on MSDN does not even override pasting, so you can easily ctrl-V a non-numeric string into the control.

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