Doing Calculations Right with the Math Class
The .NET Framework gives you the Math class, which has a ton of methods and properties that you can use.
The Abs function will convert negative numbers to positive (and leave positive numbers alone), while the Sign method will tell you if a number is positive, negative or zero.
The Truncate, Ceiling, Floor and Round methods will give you four different ways to get the integer portion of a decimal value, depending on what you want.
The DivRem method will return both the result of a division and its remainder (and IEEERemainder has a special result when you divide a smaller number by a larger number).
The Math object's PI property gives you a value of PI to more than 12 decimals -- more accuracy than you'll probably need.
The Sin, Cos and related methods will perform all of those trigonometry functions that I never really got in high school.
There's more functionality here than I can discuss, but I have to mention the BigMul method (which sounds like the name of a Scottish folk hero to me). When you multiply two large integer numbers you might get a result bigger than an integer … which will cause an overflow exception. BigMul, on the other hand, will multiply two 32-bit integers and return a Long, avoiding overflow.
Maybe it is a folk hero.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/15/2016