In practice, there are no really compelling points against it. I'm not a fan, but that's a personal preference, there's no empirical data to suggest that the With
construct is bad.
In .NET, it compiles to exactly the same code as fully-qualifying the object name, so there is no performance penalty for this sugar. I ascertained this by compiling, then disassembling, the following VB .NET 2.0 class:
Imports System.Text
Public Class Class1
Public Sub Foo()
Dim sb As New StringBuilder
With sb
.Append("foo")
.Append("bar")
.Append("zap")
End With
Dim sb2 As New StringBuilder
sb2.Append("foo")
sb2.Append("bar")
sb2.Append("zap")
End Sub
End Class
The disassembly is as follows -- note that the calls to sb2
's Append
method look identical to the With
statement calls for sb
:
.method public instance void Foo() cil managed
{
// Code size 91 (0x5b)
.maxstack 2
.locals init ([0] class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder sb,
[1] class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder sb2,
[2] class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder VB$t_ref$L0)
IL_0000: nop
IL_0001: newobj instance void [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::.ctor()
IL_0006: stloc.0
IL_0007: ldloc.0
IL_0008: stloc.2
IL_0009: ldloc.2
IL_000a: ldstr "foo"
IL_000f: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_0014: pop
IL_0015: ldloc.2
IL_0016: ldstr "bar"
IL_001b: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_0020: pop
IL_0021: ldloc.2
IL_0022: ldstr "zap"
IL_0027: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_002c: pop
IL_002d: ldnull
IL_002e: stloc.2
IL_002f: newobj instance void [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::.ctor()
IL_0034: stloc.1
IL_0035: ldloc.1
IL_0036: ldstr "foo"
IL_003b: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_0040: pop
IL_0041: ldloc.1
IL_0042: ldstr "bar"
IL_0047: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_004c: pop
IL_004d: ldloc.1
IL_004e: ldstr "zap"
IL_0053: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder [mscorlib]System.Text.StringBuilder::Append(string)
IL_0058: pop
IL_0059: nop
IL_005a: ret
} // end of method Class1::Foo
So if you like it, and find it more readable, go for it; there's no compelling reason not to.
(By the way, Tom, I'm interested in knowing what happened with the debugger -- I can't recall ever seeing any unusual behavior in the debugger based on a With
statement, so I'm curious to know what behavior you did see.)