The syntax might be a little unfamiliar to new programmers, but using TryParse instead of Parse can make your application faster and more scalable. This is because when it's unable to parse the supplied value, it falls back on a default value, instead of throwing an exception.

This must be a .NET thing. I've never heard of Parse or TryParse before.

Sorry, I was thinking the .NET forum was for WinForms and console applications, and that the ASP forum was for both flavors of ASP, so I put this here. But it turns out this forum is for Classic ASP, and I posted in the wrong place. So go ahead and ignore this message.

Although if you're curious, C# doesn't support CInt("413") so if you want to turn an ID=x query string into a number, you have to use int.Parse, or double.Parse, or what have you.

The problem is that if it can't parse the value ( say "four" ) it will throw an exception, which really slows things down. Most people don't know about TryParse, which performs the same work as type.Parse, except that it just returns a default value ( instead of throwing an exception ) when it can't read your string.

Instead of using int.Parse use Convert.ToInt32.

Convert.ToInt32 handles "null" better than int.Parse.

That's the difference between these two, though they do the same job.

Interesting, I haven't used Convert.xxx - I'll have to try this. Thanks for the tip!