Question

I tried to ask a question yesterday but it was seemingly too vague. Here’s another try.

In the past, I have used some winforms/VB.Net classes with functionality for, say, working on text strings, for file operations, or for database handling, like clsStrings, clsIO and clsDB. The idea was that these classes did everything related to the subject, so that clsStrings would have a method called “filterString”, removeCertainChars” etc.

In the old winforms application, I simply wrote Imports clsStrings when I needed to access a method. Throughout the .vb file, I could then write something like

str = filterString(TextBox1.Text)

I now try to get the same functionality in a new winforms app in C#. The only thing I get to work is creating a variable for the class:

clsStrings clsstrings = New clsStrings();

…and then later in the code:

str = clsstrings.filterString(TextBox1.Text);

So I guess what I would want is the ability to use a using statement for these “helper classes” (is there a better word for them?) so that I wouldn’t have to write the variable name all the time. (Just like when Intellisense discovers that a namespace is missing and asks if I want to have a using statement for, say, System.Data so I can write “DataTable” instead of having to write “Data.Datatable” all the time.)

I suspect I would need to put these class files in a separate folder or so, but that would be totally fine. I just want some structure to my app.

I hope this is clearer.

Thanks for any input!

Answer 1

Well, the difference is that now you are working with OOP principles.

What you could do to be closer to what you were used to is to build static classes for the helper class, maybe even turn them into extension methods.

Example:

public static class ClsStrings
{

 public static string FilterString(this string stringToFilter) { return something; }

}

Then you could call it like this:

string filteredString = TextBox1.Text.filterString();

or

string filteredString = ClsStrings.filterString(TextBox1.Text);