Compatibility of Enum Vs. string constants

Posted by Yosi on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Yosi
Published on 2013-11-06T13:35:31Z Indexed on 2013/11/06 16:10 UTC
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I was recently told that using Enum:

public enum TaskEndState { Error, Completed, Running }

may have compatibility/serialization issues, and thus sometimes it's better to use const string:

public const string TASK_END_STATE = "END_STATE";
public const string TASK_END_STATE_ERROR = "TASK_END_STATE_ERROR";
public const string TASK_END_STATE_COMPLETE = "TASK_END_STATE_COMPLETE";
public const string TASK_END_STATE_RUNNING = "TASK_END_STATE_RUNNING";

Can you find practical use case where it may happen, is there any guidelines where Enum's should be avoided?

Edit: My production environment has multiple WFC services (different versions of the same product). A later version may/or may not include some new properties as Task end state (this is just an example). If we try to deserialize a new Enum value in an older version of a specific service, it may not work.

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