Why does the Nameof operator in VB.NET return the member name with the wrong case?
nameof is one of my favorite operators in C# 6 – it’s a little thing that makes life a little easier. I use it a lot in Entity Framework 6 with the ForeignKey attribute and when throwing ArgumentExceptions so that I don’t have to have magic strings everywhere.
I discovered some interesting behavior regarding Nameof in VB.NET that I thought took VB.NET’s case insensitivity to the next level:
See the difference in outputs? FirstName versus fIRsTnAMe? I mean, c’mon, really? The Nameof operator returns exactly what you type inside of it and not the actual properly cased member name??
This actually caused me a fair bit of grief the other night – I was using Nameof with the ForeignKey attribute in EF and kept getting these odd exceptions where it said it couldn’t find the member called Firstname – and all because I mistyped the casing for the property (FirstName.)
I’ve always had a soft spot for VB.NET – in fact I wrote a whole blog post about it a couple of years ago. I don’t use it nearly as much anymore – I only have one client who has a VB.NET app. I gotta say though, it’s weirdness like this that makes me not miss it much, cause that sure is a strange design decision. It’s one of the very few times that a VB.NET feature is truly not on par with a similar C# one.
(See also: unexpected behavior when using VB.NET’s If() with nullable types: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10699740/mystery-of-the-if-function-in-vb-net)