Since the .Net framework was built using Object Oriented Methods, you can use this to your advantage to save yourself some typing down the road...
As you may know, Every single object in the .Net framework is derived from the base Object class... this means that certain fields and methods will be present in the class.
The method I will discuss is the ToString() method. This returns a string representation of the current object. You can call this method from any and every object present in the .Net framework. Now, I work with strings a lot since I'm a web developer. Any time that I have to print out a value, or assign said value to a textbox/label, it must be in string format. So I find myself typing theobject.ToString() a lot. I also write a lot of functions that deal with strings like the fictional example below.
private void FormatIt(String str)
{
...
}
Response.Write(FormatIt(datareader["name"].ToString()));
Notice that I had to call the tostring function on the datareader field because the method was expecting a string instead of an object. If I had to call the FormatIt function 50 times, I would have to type ToString() 50 times. this can get tiresome. That's when I realized that I could use the base Object class to save me some typing by changing the function to look like this.
private void FormatIt(Object Ostr)
{
String str = Ostr.ToString();
...
}
Response.Write(FormatIt(datareader["name"]));
Hope that helps someone out there.