How-to: get int value via ADO.net SqlDataReader using column name

Based on Sam Holder’s answer at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7388475/reading-int-values-from-sqldatareader/54296026, just contributed an extension method for fetching Int32 values via ADO.net’s SqlDataReader, without jumping through hoops (aka first fetch column ordinal [number] by name, then fetching the int value passing the column ordinal).

Would be nice if Microsoft was providing such things out of the box.

namespace adonet.extensions
{
  public static class AdonetExt
  {
    public static int GetInt32(this SqlDataReader reader, string columnName)
    {
      return reader.GetInt32(reader.GetOrdinal(columnName));
    }
  }
}

and use it like this

using adonet.extensions;

//…

int farmsize = reader.GetInt32("farmsize");

assuming there is no GetInt32(string) already in SqlDataReader – if there is any, just use some other method name instead