Recently I ran into a problem where I had to dive into the C# bag of tricks. It's not a complicated trick and it's been around for quite some time (which is why I had to dive into the bag, rathen than skim the LINQ surface). But I've never used it until now, so here's a quick review of implicit conversions.

I needed to create a percentage value. Basically, I wanted to restrict a decimal between the values of 0 to 100 inclusive [1]. So rather than spread that rule around in code, I created a tiny struct:

using System;

namespace ImplicitConversion
{
    public struct Percentage
    {
        private decimal value;

        public Percentage(decimal value)
        {
            if(value < 0m || value > 100m)
            {
                throw new ArgumentException("The value must be between 0 and 100 inclusive.", "value");
            }

            this.value = value;
        }

        public decimal Value
        {
            get
            {
                return this.value;
            }
        }
    }
}

OK, that works [2], but then I created a function like this:

static void Report(Percentage one, Percentage two)
{
    Console.Out.WriteLine(one);
    Console.Out.WriteLine(two);
}

and I accidentally used it like this:

Program.Report(10m, 20m);

Of course, to fix it, I could've done this:

Program.Report(new Percentage(10m), 
   new Percentage(20m));

but that felt...unnatural. Why couldn't I just convert it? That would be so cool if I could...hey, wait a minute! C# has implicit conversion:

using System;

namespace ImplicitConversion
{
    public struct Percentage
    {
        private decimal value;

        public Percentage(decimal value)
        {
            if(value < 0m || value > 100m)
            {
                throw new ArgumentException("The value must be between 0 and 100 inclusive.", "value");
            }

            this.value = value;
        }

        public static implicit operator decimal(Percentage value)
        {
            return value.value;
        }

        public static implicit operator Percentage(decimal value)
        {
            return new Percentage(value);
        }

        public decimal Value
        {
            get
            {
                return this.value;
            }
        }
    }
}

And all was well again.

Again, I've never used implict (or explicit) conversion since C# came out. But in this case it seems like a natural fit.

[1] Yes, I realize a percentage can be negative and go beyond the upper range I gave. Just ignore that for now.

[2] I would've like to make it generic, but then I would've wanted to constrain the type to unsigned numerics, and that's not doable in the where clauses. Plus, I just needed to get this done with the decimal type, so I declared YAGNI :).

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