Practicing and exploring

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

Exercise 2.1 – test your knowledge

What type would you choose for the following "numbers"?

1. A person's telephone number
2. A person's height
3. A person's age
4. A person's salary
5. A book's ISBN
6. A book's price
7. A book's shipping weight
8. A country's population
9. The number of stars in the Universe
10. The number of employees in each of the small or medium businesses in the UK (up to about 50,000 employees per business)

Exercise 2.2 – practice number sizes and ranges

Create a Console Application project named Ch02_Exercise02 that outputs the number of bytes in memory that each of the following number types use and the minimum and maximum possible values they can have: sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, float, double, and decimal.

Tip

Read the online MSDN documentation for Composite Formatting, available at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txafckwd(v=vs.110).aspx, to learn how to align text in a console application.

The output of your application should look something like the following screenshot:

Exercise 2.3 – explore topics

Use the following links to read more about the topics covered in this chapter:

• C# Keywords: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x53a06bb.aspx
• Integral Types Table (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exx3b86w.aspx
• Floating-Point Types Table (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9ahet949.aspx
• decimal (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/364x0z75.aspx
• bool (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c8f5xwh7.aspx
• char (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x9h8tsay.aspx
• string (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/362314fe.aspx
• var (C# Reference): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383973.aspx
• Nullable Types (C# Programming Guide): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1t3y8s4s.aspx
• Standard Numeric Format Strings: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dwhawy9k(v=vs.110).aspx
• Custom Numeric Format Strings: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0c899ak8(v=vs.110).aspx
• Custom Date and Time Format Strings: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4(v=vs.110).aspx
• Composite Formatting: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txafckwd(v=vs.110).aspx
• Console Class: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.console(v=vs.110).aspx
• C# Operators: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6a71f45d.aspx
• Languages features in C# 6 and VB 14: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/wiki/Languages-features-in-C%23-6-and-VB-14