Cathal, I completely agree.  There are many blogs and sample applications to prove this.  However, in the instances where StringBuilder is not efficient, String.Concat is FAR more efficient over the standard concatenation method ("&" or "+").  Even if you do not notice the difference from a single concatenation, the difference over an entire application can be tremendous. 

It was pointed out to me in Gemini that the compiler will simply switch the concatenation characters to the String.Concat method.  However, doing it beforehand saves the compiler from having to do that.  In essence, you save the processor, the compiler, and the end-user time for every single instance of concatenation that is not using the standard concatenation characters.

In my original example, I mentioned my most recent application enhancement (in regards to this topic).  I was dealing with a travel web service where the web service would accept and respond to web requests for rentals, reservations, location information, etc.  The web service had begun to crawl upon going live due to the load it was handling.  Under heaviest load, some requests would take up to 60 seconds to receive a response. 

Once I made the changes to the way the string concatenation was done throughout the entire web service, the responses were coming back at a consistent 1-5 seconds (5 being under heavy load).  Granted, there were a couple of strings that were cached, and for common string values, I made them Constants, but the point still remains.

Unless I miss something, or am not able to accurately test the affects of a specific string concatenation, I never use standard string concatenation anymore.  It simply has proven itself horribly inefficient.

Now, as for the DNN project or any other like it, small enhancements like this can go a very long way.  Every application can benefit from better string concatenation (unless it's already done).

I am very happy to have been able to contribute my proposed ehnancements to Gemini, and I hope that they stand on their own during testing.  Thank you very much for your continued contributions and efforts.  I appreciate all that you do every day.

Open reflector, go to System.String and examine the Equility operator:

Public Shared Operator =(ByVal a As String, ByVal b As String) As Boolean
    Return String.Equals(a, b)
End Function

So why should we stop using the "=" Operator

Stefan, I like your suggestion.  It is also useful to note that the "ToUpper" and similar functions create a new instance of the same string (only in lowercase).