Question

A co-worker just created the following construction in C# (the example code is simplified). His goal was to shorten the notation for all predefined strings in the rest of the code.

public struct PredefinedStrings
{
    public const string VeryLongName = "Very Long Name";
    public const string AnotherVeryLongName = "Another Very Long Name";
    public const string TheLastVeryLongName = "The Last Very Long Name";
}

public static void MethodThatUsesTheNames()
{
    Console.WriteLine(PredefinedStrings.VeryLongName);
    Console.WriteLine(PredefinedStrings.AnotherVeryLongName);
    Console.WriteLine(PredefinedStrings.TheLastVeryLongName);
}

Although it seems to work fine for him, I can’t stop wondering whether he should have used a static class instead of a struct or if there’s a more elegant way to achieve this.

What would be the preferred way to do this? Please also explain why.

Answer 1

With the struct solution, there’s nothing to stop some other code doing new PredefinedStrings(), which won’t do anything bad, but is something it’s semantically confusing to allow. With a static class the compiler will forbid creation for you. And it goes without saying that static class is the preferred way of providing constants in the Framework.

edit to add, I said that second part without evidence – I have since searched and reasonably quickly found System.Net.Mime.DispositionTypeNames and System.Net.WebRequestMethods.Http.