William Duffy

Has DateTime.Parse ever thrown the following exception when you passed it a legally formatted value, leaving you bemused as to why it can’t parse it?
String was not recognized as a valid DateTime
As powerful as DateTime.Parse is, it cannot handle every representation of a date/time value without a little help from you, the developer.
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In programming it is a common occurrence to have a list of possiblities from which you would like the first available option selected. SQL Server has a handy method (Coalesce) which makes performing this easy, but unless you are using nullable types .NET does not have a suitable alternative. Here, I will make a helper [...]