Nothing = String.Empty (Why are these equal?)

Question

Why does the first if statement evaluate to true? I know if I use \"is\" instead of \"=\" then it won\'t evaluate to true. If I replace String.Empty with \"Foo\" it doesn\

Answer 1

It's a special case of VB's = and <> operators.

The Language Specification states in Section 11.14:

When doing a string comparison, a null reference is equivalent to the string literal "".

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If you are interested in further details, I have written an in-depth comparison of vbNullString, String.Empty, "" and Nothing in VB.NET here:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/34069187/87698