Question

I have lots of global read only strings (around 100) that I am using in my application that will never change. I have been trying to think of the best solution that is easy to code and doesn’t have too much impact on performance. I need the strings to be used throughout the application like the example below, where Relationship is just a category in which the value is grouped and Alternate is the string value itself.

Relationship.Alternate

I have thought of creating static classes with static read only fields, static classes with const fields, implementing a Singleton pattern and even creating and parsing enums in a helper method. Can anybody provide some good advice on the best way to tackle this problem.

Answer 1

How about using resource files?

They are typed, easily accesible from your code at run-time, easily editable without need to recompile, and support any string content (i.e. not like enums, which only support identifier-like strings).

For example, you can add a resource file named GlobalStrings.resx to your C# project, and then add a string named Relationship_Alternate to that file. You can type any value you want for that string. In code, you would access the string value as:

GlobalStrings.Relationship_Alternate

Since those are identifiers validated at compile-time, you can guarantee that all your strings will load successfully at run-time.

Hope it helps.