Question

I am going through this WPF tutorial http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/alanl/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=18 and I have a question about the CountToFontSizeConverter section of the tutorial. Could someone please explain the return statement to me i.e

return ((minFontSize + count + increment) < maxFontSize) ? 
         (minFontSize + count + increment) : maxFontSize;

I understand it’s a conditional but the syntax looks rather bespoke. If possible could someone re-write this in a simpler way? Thanks

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean by “somewhat bespoke” but it’s worth breaking down.

Original:

return ((minFontSize + count + increment) < maxFontSize) 
      ? (minFontSize + count + increment) : maxFontSize;

Broken down:

bool condition = (minFontSize + count + increment) < maxFontSize;
if (condition)
{
    return minFontSize + count + increment;
}
else
{
    return maxFontSize;
}

Better approach – far more readable:

return Math.Min(minFontSize + count + increment, maxFontSize);

In general, you can usually replace an expression of the form

a < b ? a : b

with

Math.Min(a, b)

assuming that a and b are of numeric types. It’s not always the case, but it’s a good starting point.