I think that’s the entire point of the article, actually. That is what the syntax highlighting would seem to indicate – but in this case, just like with bool/Boolean, int/Int32 and so on, this is actually not true.

These are actual aliases for one another – and they are exactly equivalent in every way other than the color they get highlighted on the screen.

I think the bone of contention is whether or not that is “good” – and what constitutes “best practice” with regards to readability and such. At the end of the day, though – if you use them interchangeably, there is absolutely no performance difference whatsoever – because both string and String compile to System.String – and are exactly identical.

This is far more an esoteric debate revolving around preference.

My belief is that the alias exists to make code more readable, and has as much to do with syntax highlighting in VS than anything. Although a reference type, System.String is used like a simple value type in the overwhelming majority of cases. The exception to this is when accessing static members of the class like String.Empty.

Therefore, I would use ’string’ when instantiating a new instance, and declaring variables etc. But when I need to put string.Something, it’s time to switch to the capital S – String, as we don’t often see valuetype.Something, so in my view string.Empty looks odd, so IMHO, best use would be…

string foo = String.Empty;

P.S. @Josh … spoken like a true VB programmer

that’s why he said vb should be deprecated or put to obsolence

Microsoft created VB for guys like you who still need training wheels.

Use like so:

String nameOfSomething = String.Empty;

i mean String is a class and who starts a class name in lowercase? Right knowone

Why? Because people just need rules, apparently.