Formatting Messages Handling plurality adequately

Published: March 1st, 2016, Updated: Some days ago

Once in a while I stumble upon code to format message texts in C#, either mine or from developers on Stack Overflow. It looks like this:

string messageTemplate;
if (_itemCount == _persistedItemCount)
    messageTemplate = Resources.ProtocolMessageAllItemsAreFiled;
else if (_persistedItemCount == 0)
    messageTemplate = Resources.ProtocolMessageNoItemsAreFiled;
else
    messageTemplate = Resources.ProtocolMessageSomeItemsAreFiled;
return String.Format(messageTemplate, _persistedItemCount, _itemCount);

Developers get quite — let's say — "creative" to format readable message texts for the user, especially when it comes to plurality. Source code like this is ok, but we can do better.

C# developers usually love the keyword var:

var isProcessed = false;
var numberOfElements = 10;
for (var i = 0; i < productList.Count; i++)
    // ...

How can this innocent keyword be bad?

When designing a button bar in WPF I discovered a strange behaviour of the UniformGrid. My buttons did not look very uniformly.

C#

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