Well, I get to be one of the lucky people that gets to go to the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference in Los Angeles, CA on October 27-30. Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attend the PDC to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and to exchange ideas with fellow professionals. You’ll learn about upcoming products, meet Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, and write some code.

At this year's conference, Microsoft will be giving a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits from the conference to each attendee instead of a collection of DVDs as in the past. It is even rumored that a Beta version of Windows 7 will be included as well.

Channel 9 on MSDN has been producing a series of Countdown to PDC 2008 videos to help everyone get a great overview of what to expect this year at PDC. Here is just a few of the videos that you can watch about the upcoming conference:

• This is the Software + Services PDC: Mike Swanson
• By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson
• Building Block Services, John Shewchuk
• Extending the Data Platform to the Cloud: Dave Campbell
• Amitabh Srivastava: Corporate Vice President of Cloud, Infrastructure, & Services

Earlier this week I received a request from on one of my projects to allow the user to enter only the number (ex. 14) on a web form, but when the number is used in other areas of the project for the number to be shown as fourteen. So, I initially hoped there would be a built in function in C# to allow for this conversion. I wasn't able to find a function to do this out of the box.

A co-worker and I decided to set out to write our own function to accomplish the task. We decided to create the function as a static method in a helper class so that we could call the method from anywhere in the project.

The function is able to convert numbers to word from zero up through the billions. I guess you could always add larger numbers to the function if needed.

Here is the C# code that we came up with:

   1: public static string ConvertNumberToWord(long numberVal)

   2: {

   3:    string[] powers = new string[] { "thousand ", "million ", 

   4:       "billion " };

   5:  

   6:    string[] ones = new string[] {"one", "two", "three", "four", 

   7:       "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine", "ten",

   8:       "eleven", "twelve", "thirteen", "fourteen", "fifteen",

   9:       "sixteen", "seventeen", "eighteen", "nineteen"};

  10:  

  11:    string[] tens = new string[] {"twenty", "thirty", "forty", 

  12:       "fifty", "sixty", "seventy", "eighty", "ninety"};

  13:  

  14:    string wordValue = "";

  15:  

  16:    if (numberVal == 0) return "zero";

  17:    if (numberVal < 0)

  18:    {

  19:       wordValue = "negative ";

  20:       numberVal = -numberVal;

  21:    }

  22:  

  23:    long[] partStack = new long[] { 0, 0, 0, 0 };

  24:    int partNdx = 0;

  25:  

  26:    while (numberVal > 0)

  27:    {

  28:       partStack[partNdx++] = numberVal % 1000;

  29:       numberVal /= 1000;

  30:    }

  31:  

  32:    for (int i = 3; i >= 0; i--)

  33:    {

  34:       long part = partStack[i];

  35:  

  36:       if (part >= 100)

  37:       {

  38:          wordValue += ones[part / 100 - 1] + " hundred ";

  39:          part %= 100;

  40:       }

  41:  

  42:       if (part >= 20)

  43:       {

  44:          if ((part % 10) != 0) wordValue += tens[part / 10 - 2] + 

  45:             " " + ones[part % 10 - 1] + " ";

  46:          else wordValue += tens[part / 10 - 2] + " ";

  47:       }

  48:       else if (part > 0) wordValue += ones[part - 1] + " ";

  49:  

  50:       if (part != 0 && i > 0) wordValue += powers[i - 1];

  51:    }

  52:  

  53:    return wordValue;

  54: }