As Bilbo Baggins desperately tried to guess while on his adventures in The Hobbit, the answer to “What’s it got in his pocketses” - “String ...… or Nothing “ (which was really two guesses).
I came across another example of one of those relatively small improvements in VB2005 this week. It won’t send your productivity zooming but it’s still nice to see these little tweaks that all add up to an overall improvement of the language.
There previously has been – and still is – a ReadOnly member of the String Class called Empty. The usage is:-
Dim s As String
' Some other code
If s = String.Empty Then ' Do something
On the same lines, there previously has been – and still is – the IsNothing function available in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace.
If Not IsNothing(d) Then ' Do something
The new tweak I mentioned combines both of the above tests and combines them into one new method in the String class - IsNullOrEmpty.
It’s a Shared function that returns a Boolean value, so the syntax is:
If String.IsNullOrEmpty(s) Then ' Do Something
(where s is a String variable)
And the kind of scenario where you will get a result of True includes:
Dim s As String ' Default value is empty string
s = Nothing ' Explicitly set to Nothing
s = "" ' Explicitly set to an empty string
Might come in handy one day . Now, where did I put that ring ......