Using == or Equals for string comparison

Question

In some languages (e.g. C++) you can't use operators like == for string comparisons as that would compare the address of the string object, and not the string itself. However, in C# you can use == to compare strings, and it will actually compare the content of the strings. But there are also string functions to handle such comparisons, so my question is; should you?

Given two strings:

string aa = "aa"; 
string bb = "bb";

Should you compare them like this:

bool areEqual = (aa == bb); 

Or should you use the Equal function, like this:

bool areEqual = aa.Equals(bb); 

Is there any technical difference anyway? Or reasonable arguments for best practice?

Answer 1

I wouldn't use:

aa.Equals(bb)

unless I knew aa couldn't possibly be null. I might use:

string.Equals(aa,bb)

But I'd mainly use that it I wanted to use one of the specific StringComparison modes (invariant, ordinal, case-insensitive, etc). Although I might also use the StringComparer implementations, since they are a bit easier to abstract (for example, to pass into a Dictionary<string, Foo> for a case-insensitive ordinal dictionary). For general purpose usage,

a == b

is fine.