Question

Recently I’ve noticed that when we’ve been doing string comparisons in our .NET code we have been safeguarding against null references. This check seems unnecessary in VB.NET because it overloads the equality operator and performs this null ref check for us. Do you all agree ?

See examples below:

        Dim myStringVariable As String

        ' Unnecessary in VB.NET
        If myStringVariable Is Nothing OrElse myStringVariable = "" Then
        End If

        ' Unnecessary in VB.NET
        If String.IsNullOrEmpty(myStringVariable) Then
        End If

        ' This will work
        If myStringVariable = "" Then
        End If

        ' Also acceptable if you don't like using hard coded constants
        If myStringVariable = String.Empty Then
        End If

Answer 1

Specifically for equality tests you may be right. However, equality tests are not the only thing you do with strings.

I have not done much VB.Net, but I strongly suspect that

myStringVariable.Length

will blow up if myStringVariable is null, er… Nothing.