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I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here at my house, we’ve been hit by wave after wave of colds. I’m not talking, slight sniffles with some light body aches, I mean delirium inducing fevers with body racking coughs and different types and consistencies of fluids running out of every orifice the body has to offer. To make that delightful image even better magnify it across a family of five. Oh yeah. It’s a pretty sight.

It’s been very draining with no apparent end in sight. Every time it seems like we’re on the mend and we can once again walkabout without having to shout “Unclean! Unclean!”, one family member or another starts back up again on a new variety of the flu that we haven’t been introduced to yet. Then they, as all proper members of society should, generously share what they now have in abundance with the rest of the family.

Currently, I feel like I’m constantly drowning with fluid in my lungs.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of sharing any of this was, but I did. You can thank me later.

So, we were sitting around in the lunchroom talking, and came up with something that we think could be a really valuable change to a key method in the .NET framework (as well as in just about every other language). The name IsNumeric is misleading, because you would expect it to return true only if the value was truly a number, but as many know this is not really the case. As such, I have created a couple of other methods that may be suitable to replace it.

Public Function MostLikelyNumeric(ByVal Expression As Object) As Boolean
     Return IsNumeric(Expression)
End Function

Public Function PossiblyNumeric(ByVal Expression As Object) As Boolean
     Return IsNumeric(Expression)
End Function

Either of those seem like they are more descriptive….