General CS question about constants

Question

I\'m programming using C#, after programming on C. So I\'m using a lot of constants such as \"DEFAULT_USER_ID\", \"REMOTE_ADDRESS\" and such...

It seems to me that it\'s

Answer 1

Using constants for stuff like DEFAULT_USER_ID is still "the way to go" (unless you want it to be configurable, but that's another topic). --> const (C# Reference)

Don't use constants for enumerations (FILE_TYPE_DOC = 1, FILE_TYPE_XLS = 2, ...). This can be done more elegantly in C# with enums:

enum FileType {
   Doc,
   Xls,   // or, optionally, "Xls = 2".
   ...
};

You can also use this for flags (constants combinable by bitwise operators), which is another common use case of constants in C:

[Flags]
enum FontDecoration {
    None = 0,
    Bold = 1,
    Italic = 2,
    Underline = 4
}