Finished project

[mrgee1978]

Please critique my code and help me improve. A little disappointed that I did not feel I was able to do the challenges yet. But I will keep learning and improving.

[TheCSharpAcademy]

@mrgee1978 Thanks for submitting and apologies for the delay! Unfortunately I ran into problems when trying to add a record. You should use TryParse or TryParseExact (recommended) instead of parse, otherwise computers with a different date format will get this error:

Could you please fix it so I can approve? 😄

[mrgee1978]

@TheCSharpAcademy thank you so much for reviewing my code. On the method that threw the exception, I had already done a check to make sure that the date string passed to the method was a valid one in the GetValidDateString() method. I have been trying to recreate the problem by entering the date string that appears in your screen capture and it seems to work fine for me I don't get the exception, so I was wondering if there was anyway that you could tell me everything that you entered when trying to add a coding session. I want to understand exactly what I did wrong to cause it to throw an exception and this would help me tremendously so that I can refactor the code. Thank you so very much for all of your help.

[nwdorian]

Hey @mrgee1978 👋,

sorry for the long reply, it looks like this got lost in our backlog.

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I looked over the issue with DateTime parsing throwing an exception. It seems to be caused by GetValidStartDate method, because it's using DateTime.Parse which uses the machine’s current culture by default, which may not match InvariantCulture, and therefore can throw a FormatException, even though it passed the earlier check.

A fix would be to use DateTime.ParseExact(validDateString, dateFormat, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).

But at that point you might as well use DateTime.TryParseExact() like in the previous method.

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If you end up fixing the bug, push the changes to your fork. The PR will get updated and I will be notified to check. ☺️

Best regards,
@nwdorian