Reflection IT Blog

If you write business apps, there are a lot of controls for data input: TextBox, CheckBox, ComboBox, DatePicker, ToggleSwitch, TimePicker, RadioButton, Slider, etc. I always wondered why there was no NumberBox. Numeric input is very common so it needs its own control for it. Luckily there is the Windows UI Library (WinUI), an open source project from Microsoft. I proposed the NumberBox last year and the team did a great job implementing it. It is released in version 2.3 and most of the issues are now solved. Time for a blog post showing of its features.

This animated GIF demonstrates a few of the features like AcceptsExpression, PlaceholderText, SpinButtons and NumberFormatter. I 'stole' it from this tweet.

C# boxing with String concatenation and interpolation

Boxing is evil and you should always try to avoid it. That is what I tell my students in my C# training. But what is boxing and how do you avoid it. Boxing is wrapping a value type (struct) inside a reference type (object or interface) variable.