The VB.NET 'With' Statement - embrace or avoid?

Question

At work, I\'m frequently working on projects where numerous properties of certain objects have to be set during their construction or early during their lifetime. For the sa

Answer 1

I don't use VB.NET (I used to use plain VB) but...

Is the leading dot mandatory? If so, then I don't see a problem. In Javascript, the result of using with is that a property of an object looks just the same as a plain variable, and that is very dangerous, as you don't see if you're accessing a property or a variable, and thus, with is something to avoid.

Not only is its use easier on the eyes, but for repeated access to properties of an object, it's likely to be faster, as the object is fetched through the method chain only once, and not once for every property.

I do agree with other replies that you ought to avoid nested use of with, for the same reason as why to avoid with altogether in Javascript: because you no longer see what object your property belongs to.

Answer 2

If you have long variablenames and would end up with:

UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.FirstName="Stefan"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.LastName="Karlsson"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Age="39"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Sex="Male"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Occupation="Programmer"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.UserID="0"
....and so on

then I would use WITH to make it more readable:

With UserHandler.GetUser.First.User
    .FirstName="Stefan"
    .LastName="Karlsson"
    .Age="39"
    .Sex="Male"
    .Occupation="Programmer"
    .UserID="0"
end with

In the later example there are even performance benefit over the first example because in the first example Im fetching the user every time I access a user property and in the WITH-case I only fetch the user one time.

I can get the performance gain without using with, like this:

dim myuser as user =UserHandler.GetUser.First.User
myuser.FirstName="Stefan"
myuser.LastName="Karlsson"
myuser.Age="39"
myuser.Sex="Male"
myuser.Occupation="Programmer"
myuser.UserID="0"

But I would go for the WITH statement instead, it looks cleaner.

And I just took this as an example so dont complain over a class with many keywords, another example could be like: WITH RefundDialog.RefundDatagridView.SelectedRows(0)

Answer 3

I would be suspicious of code that uses a lot this keyword: if it is used to make easier to set lots of instance variables or properties I think this may indicate that your classes are too large ( Large Class smell ). If you use it to replace long chains of calls like this:

UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.FirstName="Stefan"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.LastName="Karlsson"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Age="39"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Sex="Male"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Occupation="Programmer"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.UserID="0"

then you are probably violating Demeter Law

Answer 4

The 'with' is basically the 'cascade' from Smalltalk. It is a pattern in Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns book.

A summary of the pattern: use it when it makes sense to group the messages sent to the object. Don't use it if it just happens to be some messages sent to the same object.