Question

Current best practice is to use Environment.NewLine in your code to, well, start a new line. I would like to be able to use an alias or overloaded operator in my code so that it is more concise.
Instead of this:

MessageBox.Show("My first line here" + Environment.NewLine + "My second line here");

I would like to have something like this:

MessageBox.Show("My first line here" + NL + "My second line here");

How can I easily set this up one time as an IDE setting, or for a whole project/namespace?

An alias or overloaded operator is that comes to mind, but not sure if there is a good way of doing a global alias that is more concise than Environment.NewLine, and I’ve never done an overloaded operator before, so not familiar with the ins and outs of that.

Answer 1

Simple shortening method. Pop this class in one of your utility assemblies:

namespace MyCompany
{
    public static class E
    {
        public static readonly string NL = System.Environment.NewLine;
    }
}

then you can happily use it as such:

using MyCompany;

MessageBox.Show("My first line here" + E.NL + "My second line here");