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A fellow developer suggested we store a selection of days of the week as 7-character string of 1’s and 0’s, i.e. “1000100” for Monday and Friday. I preferred (and strongly suggested) a solution with a Flags enum and bitwise operations, I think it's a cleaner way of doing this, and it should be easier to understand for other developers. [Flags()] public enum Weekdays : int { Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2, Wednesday = 4, Thursday = 8, Friday = 16, Saturday = 32, Sunday = 64 } However, as I started to implement a sample solution, I realized that maybe the simple string approach was easier after all: Certainly the bit-string is more obvious than “17” if you’re just looking at the data. And I find the C# bitwise operations counter-intuitive and extremely verbose: Weekdays workDays = Weekdays.Monday | Weekdays.Tuesday; if ((workDays & Weekdays.Monday) == Weekdays.Monday) {...} Of course this could be wrapped nicely into extension methods, but then we suddenly end up with at least the same number of lines of code as with the string-solution, and I can hardly argue the bitwise code is easier to read. That being said, I still would go with a flags enum and bitwise operations. The key benefits I can think of are Better performance Less space needed for storage So how do I sell the bitwise solution to my colleagues? Should I? What are the other benefits of using this method over strings? After completing the sample project, I found that the team still opted for the string-based solution. I need some better/stronger arguments. Why should you use Flags enums rather than simple bit-strings?

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