Early in the ads for .NET 4.0, there were rumours about two types dealing with numeric stuff, BigInteger and Complex. In the Beta 1 phase, BigInteger has appeared (I’ve briefly blogged about it), but Complex was nowhere to be found.

With the advent of .NET 4.0 Beta 2, I was happy to find the emergence of the Complex type in the System.Numerics namespace (and these numeric types have been moved to their own System.Numerics.Dll assembly).

Complex is, of course, represents a complex number, with a Real part and an Imaginary part. It hosts all the usual expected properties and methods, including operator overloading and conversions.

One mishap, I believe, is the existence of a Magnitude property, returning the length of the complex number as measured from the origin, but no MagnitudeSquared property, which is an optimization – as sometimes this is what is needed and the overhead of performing a square root for the Magnitude property is unnecessary (Magnitude is calculated with the super famous pythagorean theorem, requiring a costly square root operation).

Hopefully, this property will be added in the .NET 4.0 RTM.