Best Substitute for Enum of Strings?

[Niya]

I favor an approach like EG's however with a little bit more since i'm utterly spoiled by the intuitiveness of the VS IDE. You can get his shared properties approach to behave in the IDE as a true enum like the Color and Pen classes:-

''' <completionlist cref="DefaultMasks"/>
Public Class DefaultMasks
    Private _mask As String
    Private Sub New(ByVal mask As String)
        _mask = mask
    End Sub
 
    Public Shared ReadOnly Property PhoneNumber() As DefaultMasks
        Get
            Return New DefaultMasks("(999)000-0000")
        End Get
    End Property
    Public Shared ReadOnly Property ZipCode() As DefaultMasks
        Get
            Return New DefaultMasks("00000-9999")
        End Get
    End Property
    Public Shared Widening Operator CType(ByVal dm As DefaultMasks) As String
        Return dm._mask
    End Operator
 
End Class

The key to making this work is the completionlist tag above the class declarations. Notice that ive also made a couple of adjustments to EG's example. First I have the properties return a DefaultMasks object instead of a string so we can declare a variable as DefaultMasks without provoking a type mismatch. Ive also overriden the assignment operator so you can assign an object of type DefaultMasks directly to a string as:-

Dim dm As DefaultMasks = DefaultMasks.PhoneNumber
 
Dim s As String = dm

However, it may be better to override the ToString method of the class to make this assignment more explicit and obvious to anyone reading the code.