This is a sponsored review on CSV Reader, a csv file .Net class used to parse virtually any commonly found delimited data format, CSV files, tab delimited files. Basically this review is useful for programmers in C#, VB.Net, ASP.Net, or any other .Net language and compatible with the 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 .Net frameworks. Basically if you have never heard of any of the programming languages above, you can stop here because you do not need CSV Reader.

Any programmers in his programming work will almost always face the needs to import data from other sources, either other databases or plain text files. To make job easier for us poor programmer, CSV or Comma-separated values is created. Basically here is the layman terms for CSV:

CSV, comma separated values, files are commonly used to transport large amounts of tabular data between either companies or applications that are not directly connected. The files are easily editable using common spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel.

As to how to make use of CSV files more efficiently, we can use CSV Reader who claims that it is an extremely fast and stable .Net class. The advantage is SPEED! Accordig to CSV Reader, data can be parsed in less than half of the time of any other parser it has been benchmarked against. Rough benchmarks on a 2 Ghz processor, parsing common comma separated columns is 20 MB, or 390,000 rows with 5 columns each, almost 2,000,000 cells total, of data parsing per second. That is quite an amazing figure, by any standard. You can also visualize the speed of CSV Reader using the bar chart below:

Beside the chart above, if you need more proof or benchmark of CSV Reader against other similar ways of reading CSV Files, you can refer to the benchmark page. As a programmer myself, selecting and using a proven solution that work is always more time and cost saving than reinventing the wheel. Why make it yourself and spending time cracking your brain when there is a better tool to do the trick. With the list price of $150 if you order by Jun 15th, it is a bargain if it can do as claimed. You can have a look on the example codes too.

The current version of CSV Reader is ver. 4.0, as seen from the change log, we can see that since year 2005, constant changes and new improvements are being included in various subsequence release of ver. 2.0 and ver. 3.0 in year 2006. This shows the commitment from CSV Reader developer and you can be sure that the supports for future enhancement.