The VB.NET 'With' Statement - embrace or avoid?

Question

At work, I'm frequently working on projects where numerous properties of certain objects have to be set during their construction or early during their lifetime. For the sake of convenience and readability, I often use the With statement to set these properties. I find that

With Me.Elements
    .PropertyA = True
    .PropertyB = "Inactive"
    ' And so on for several more lines
End With

Looks much better than

Me.Elements.PropertyA = True
Me.Elements.PropertyB = "Inactive"
' And so on for several more lines

for very long statements that simply set properties.

I've noticed that there are some issues with using With while debugging; however, I was wondering if there were any compelling reasons to avoid using With in practice? I've always assumed the code generated via the compiler for the above two cases is basically the same which is why I've always chosen to write what I feel to be more readable.

Answer 1

If you have long variablenames and would end up with:

UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.FirstName="Stefan"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.LastName="Karlsson"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Age="39"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Sex="Male"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.Occupation="Programmer"
UserHandler.GetUser.First.User.UserID="0"
....and so on

then I would use WITH to make it more readable:

With UserHandler.GetUser.First.User
    .FirstName="Stefan"
    .LastName="Karlsson"
    .Age="39"
    .Sex="Male"
    .Occupation="Programmer"
    .UserID="0"
end with

In the later example there are even performance benefit over the first example because in the first example Im fetching the user every time I access a user property and in the WITH-case I only fetch the user one time.

I can get the performance gain without using with, like this:

dim myuser as user =UserHandler.GetUser.First.User
myuser.FirstName="Stefan"
myuser.LastName="Karlsson"
myuser.Age="39"
myuser.Sex="Male"
myuser.Occupation="Programmer"
myuser.UserID="0"

But I would go for the WITH statement instead, it looks cleaner.

And I just took this as an example so dont complain over a class with many keywords, another example could be like: WITH RefundDialog.RefundDatagridView.SelectedRows(0)