Special chars and Escape sequences in .NET strings

Having come from C/C++ programming, and that too mainly console programming, escape sequences were very dear to me as they were my sole friends when it came to formatting the output. Now at work I work with C# .NET and things are not the same. I wrote a XSLT processor, as part of my job, and I wanted to log every successful XSL trasnformation. Well the file I/O was a lot easier with .NET types, but introducing an newline at the end of every log entry was a big pain. As I used to do earlier I simple put a "\n" at the end of the log message. This resulted in a empty square box being placed there instead of a newline. This was totally wierd and I started to wonder whether I have been writing Japanese???!!!

Then a little bit googling told me that .NET has encapsulated these special chars and newlines in a type called "Environment". This makes sense. Newline can be differnet in different environment. And with this encapsulation we get the correct newline for any environment.

So in C# if you want to add a newline to your string use the "Environment.Newline" object. VB .NET developers are, as usual, lucky with a easier encapsulation. They have a type called "ControlChars" and this can be used like this: "ControlChars.crlf" which of course is more intutive that something like environment.