Derik Whittaker

Only if you have Option Strict off ;)

It really boggles my mind that people would seriously state they base their coding decisions around saving keystrokes and no other good reason.

Mostly, I fear having to maintain their code.

I have RSI and I can still find the wherewithall type enough characters in my IDE to get it to pop up the type I really want.

I think the saved keystrokes will be much appreciated when using nested generics. Dictionary<string, List<int>> d = new Dictionary<string, List<int>>() is just noise.

I think there are some important differences in the way VB programmers use Dim and they way C# folks will be using var.

In VB when you use Dim you cannot omit the type name (unless option strict off, as noted by James), in C# you can declare the variable without writing the type name anywhere.

With Dim it's possible to create non-initialized variables, with var it's not (you can initialize with a function that returns null, but that won't cause a compiler warning for example).

Moq if you will. One less thing for me to worry about if I don't have to think about what my variable is going to do. Heck, I'm thinking I may just declare half a dozen placeholders at the beginning of each method 'just in case'. Names a,b,c,d,e, and f.

You better believe it. In my family, placeholders are just another name for 'cousins'.

With tongue firmly in cheek:

If it were about keystrokes, why "var" at all?

myVariable = 10;

...the compiler knows it has never encountered myVariable before, so it can "declare" it.  Since we're assigning an int to it, it  can declare it as Int32...

If "var" is just to differentiate a declaration from an assignment, we haven't gained much.  

If keystrokes were such a problem, we'd see lots of

using slst = System.Collections.Generic.List<string>;

When C# 3.0/.Net 3.5 was released one of the new features that was included was the &#39;var&#39; keyword