String.Contains + Some Other String Improvements in VS2005

There's some things just so glaringly obvious, so innately presupposed that you just assume it's there and it's an impossible task to convince your brain otherwise.

For me, this is string.Contains. For years I've typed "name.Conta…" only to stop and realize that it's not there. I begrudgingly type in "name.IndexOf("sdfsd")>-1" instead. The next time I do the same. In fact I've been using .Net since it was in early beta and yet I still haven't come to terms with the fact string.Contains is missing.

Then today, working in VS 2005, I once again accidentally type it in - and to my disbelief it's actually there! Very cool.

Couple of other things I noticed:

1. String.Split now accepts strings. That means you can split a string like “bob and harry and mary and jane“ on “and“ and you'll get just the people names.

2. String.NullOrEmpty is a new static method that returns true if the string is null or empty (““). All those times I've used code like “if (name==null || name==““) “...

That's what I call progress.