Decimal Rounding (VB.Net)

Today I ran upon an issue with using the ROUND function in Visual Basic .net (VB.net) that I would assume that others have also found to cause them a problem.

I was attempting to get 65.3125 to round correctly up to 65.313 and every way I tried to edit the code I was getting 65.312.   At first I was thinking that it was an order of operations issue, but after dissecting the code, I realized that it was not.

I was using the following code and failing every time:

Dim dblTotal as Double

dblTotal = ROUND(65.3125 , 3)

Result of the above code is 65.312.

The issue with the above coding is that you cannot represent 65.3125 because it rounds a double-precision floating-point value to a specified number of fractional digits. So when using the ROUND function it uses true representation and rounds down.

Correct way to code it to make it round is using MATH.ROUND :

Dim dblTotal as Double

dblTotal = MATH.ROUND(65.3125 , 3, MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero)

Result of the above code is 65.313.

The reason  the above code works is it rounds a double-precision floating-point value to a specified number of fractional digits. A parameter specifies how to round the value if it is midway between two numbers.

I hope this helps someone out a bit and saves them a bit of time. I know it helped me out greatly.

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