Getting .Net Property Names without Magic Strings

This was something that had been perking my interest every so often ever since I started truly adopting Agile development practices and re-factoring code with abandon. This meant that properties and methods could be added, removed, and renamed at any point within the life of a project. There are cases where in debug messages, log entries, reflection lookups, or Argument-related exceptions I want to extract a property name. This resulted in a magic string appearing in the code.

A classic example of needing property names is with WPF binding and PropertyChanged events. Your viewmodels may be listening for property changes on bound domain objects in order to perform actions or update calculated values. Take for example:

The problem here is that if properties within InterestRate (Delta, Rate, and EffectiveDate) are renamed, the above code will stop working as expected. Now effective unit tests should help guard against behaviour changes but it would be nice if we could avoid having a hard-coded string for the property name.

Enter the PropertyName method: I had come across a solution a while ago on Clinton's Blog around using a static method to extract property names. It worked well enough but it was still a bit clumsy. What I ended up with was:

This works well enough but I didn't really like having to explicitly declare the Type (In the above example: InterestRate x) in the parameter expression. Lately I got thinking why this functionality couldn't be adapted into an extension method...

Now the calling code looks like:

This is a compliment to the GeneralToolbox static method in that the extension method will only work against an instance of a class where the static method can work against the type. (In situations where an instance isn't present.)

- Edit: Code & unit tests are now available here.