A First Look at C# 6 - Nameof operator

This is the fourth post about the C# 6 features I used when moving Nancy.Linker over to C# 6. The first part was about primary constructors. The second part was about auto properties. The third was about expression bodied members. This one in about the new nameof operator.

The nameof operator

The new nameof operator is a unary operator that takes, as its argument, a type, an identifier or a method and returns the name of the argument. That is, if you pass in the type Uri, you get back the string "System.Uri", if you pass in a variable you get back the name of the variable as a string.

In Nancy.Linker there was one opportunity for using nameof, which I coincidentally think represents a usage of nameof that will become widespread.
In one the private methods in Nancy.Linker there is a null check followed by a possible ArgumentException:


Notice how I am repeating the name of the res variable in a string in order to tell the ArgumentException which argument is in error. With the nameof operator I avoid this duplication and potential source of inconsistency as follows:


Note that in case I rename res and forget to update the usage inside nameof I get a compile error.

Do I Like This?

Yes. It lets me have fewer magic strings.