Which one is best approach Const or Resources(resx)

Question

I am very confused due to performance hit, what is the best approach to use Const or resx. Both are used at compile time in C#. I am asking normal question not the language dependent.

Can anyone can explain in deep?

Answer 1

Use resx if your resources are locale or language specific. Since you can have separate resx for each of the language and locale, such as user displayed strings.

Use Consts if its locale and language neutral as well. For example internal package names, references to any strings which are not displayed to the user or language independent.

Answer 2

Text which is going to be displayed to the user should be in resources, as it allows you to cater for multi lingual applications. There are many examples out there. If constants are merely used internally for program flow then they can be true constants - though things like connection strings are better in config files as these do change.

Answer 3

Your question is very general but hope the comments below can help a bit:

You generally use constants when you have a set of values that a certain property of an object can take. They are used to limit make coding easier and understandable, e.g. if you have constants for status (Open = 1, Closed = 2), the code is much easier to write without mistakes and understand if you use meaningful names like Open or Closed instead of numbers 1 and 2. Constants do not give you different values for different languages (cultures).

Resources are most useful when you have to provide localisation of your system into different languages. The same property will return you a different text depending on the current culture .

Answer 4

If your values related to program,than use Const. If your values related to UI(for example) use resx.

Answer 5

Const is like literal value

const string strMsg = "test message";
MessageBox.Show(strMsg );

when c# compile this it will turn into

MessageBox.Show("test message");

meaning c# will replace constant name strMsg into literal value contained in strMsg, in performance this will be faster.

Resx is a space in your application where your values are stored and must be read first using the name as key, in performance it have an extra overhead than const

e.g.

ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager("ResourceFileName",this.GetType().Assembly);
string str=rm.GetString("Keyname");

For best approach if your targeting multilingual use Resx, for more details see this question

use const if your application not language specific or const value is numeric