What Is The Best Way To Handle Fractions

In an upcoming project I need to keep track of some fractional data values. Due to industry standards around the products which this data describes, it is important to display the fractional value as a fraction and not as a decimal; yet for purposes of sorting and filtering the data values, the decimal value of the fraction should be known.

The obvious solution since the problem describes data is to store the value as both a string-fraction and as a decimal-value. This works fine, but it does leave a disconnect between the two values, when in fact, they represent the same data.Assuming that this project will also include a strongly typed object model, which will likely drive a EF4 Code-First database, I think that the best solution involves creating a custom fraction type which can encapsulate the string and decimal values.

After thinking on the problem and some experimentation, I've come up with the following structure to meet this need, however, I'm not certain that it is the all-around "best" implemenation.Obviously "best" is a subjective term, but in general the type should be well-rounded for as many uses as possible... idealy as generic as the Decimal type it enhances. Can anyone spot any flaws or drawbacks with this implementation? I'm still not sure about the numerator and denominator fields... whether they should be readonly or priviate or what...

Here is the code:

Imports System.Runtime.Serialization
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
''' <summary>

[code].....