Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

2.5. Object-Based Manipulation

.NET is object-oriented to the core. In fact, even ordinary variables are really full-fledged objects in disguise. This means that common data types have the built-in smarts to handle basic operations (such as counting the number of characters in a string). Even better, it means you can manipulate strings, dates, and numbers in the same way in C# and in VB. This wouldn't be true if developers used special keywords that were built into the C# or VB language.

As an example, every type in the .NET class library includes a ToString() method. The default implementation of this method returns the class name. In simple variables, a more useful result is returned: the string representation of the given variable. The following ...