Why am I getting a FormatException was unhandled error?

Question

I have created a program, and a extensive test of it, I\'m getting a error that says \"FormatException was unhandled, Input string was not in a correct format\". The problem

Answer 1

Well, look at these lines:

int minsEntered = int.Parse(txtMins.Text);
int secsEntered = int.Parse(txtSecs.Text);

What do you expect those to return when the text boxes are blank?

Simply don't call int.Parse for empty textboxes. For example:

int minsEntered = txtMins.Text == "" ? 0 : int.Parse(txtMins.Text);
// Ditto for seconds

Of course, this will still go bang if you enter something non-numeric. You should probably be using int.TryParse instead:

int minsEntered;
int.TryParse(txtMins.Text, out minsEntered);

Here I'm ignoring the result of TryParse, and it will leave minsEntered as 0 anyway - but if you wanted a different default, you'd use something like:

int minsEntered;
if (!int.TryParse(txtMins.Text, out minsEntered))
{
    minsEntered = 5; // Default on parsing failure
}

(Or you can show an error message in that case...)