Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Working with BigInteger

Because the System.Numerics.BigInteger is a new type in .NET 4.0, we spend a little time on it. BigInteger is a value type exposed by the System.Numerics namespace and requires a reference to the System.Numerics.dll assembly. Basically it represents a signed, arbitrarily large integer number. This means that it doesn’t have minimum and maximum values, opposite of other value types such as Integer and Long. Instantiating a BigInteger is easy, as you can see from the following line of code:

Dim sampleBigInteger As New System.Numerics.BigInteger

You can assign any signed number to a BigInteger, because it has no minimum and maximum values, as demonstrated by the following code snippet:

Byte and Long are the smallest and ...