Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET, Second Edition

Using Constants

A constant is much like a variable; you create a name and assign it a value. However, unlike a variable, a constant is given its value at design time, and this value cannot be changed at run time. You should always use constants in place of magic numbers, for reasons I’ll discuss in this section.

Note

When you hard-code a string in a procedure, the effect is similar to that of using magic numbers. All the reasons for eliminating magic numbers also apply to eliminating hard-coded strings; if you know the value at design time, use a constant rather than hard-coding the text or the number.

Magic Numbers Are Prone to Data-Entry Problems

One of the critical problems with magic numbers is that you can easily mistype a number, transposing ...