My Favorite New Language Feature in C# 6.0 and Visual Basic 14 -- Visual Studio Magazine

.NET Tips and Tricksby Peter Vogel

My Favorite New Language Feature in C# 6.0 and Visual Basic 14

Both Visual Basic 14 and C# 6.0, developers get the NameOf operator/keyword. It doesn't do much: It returns the name of the variable or member passed to it. This means I can write properties that integrate with the INotifyPropertyChanged event with code like this:

Public Property CompanyName() As String 
  Get
    Return Me.companyNameValue
  End Get 
  Set
    Me.companyNameValue = value
    NotifyPropertyChanged(NameOf(CompanyName))
  End Set
End Property

This isn't going to make my applications run faster or anything useful like that. But it's going to eliminate a whole bunch of hardcoded strings in my applications that included the name of some program element. Now, instead of a string whose content the compiler couldn't validate, I can use NameOf and let the compiler check the parameter I pass.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/13/2015

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