Ticklish Techs

I didn’t know how this could happen. There’s a operator part of the language I love and I didn’t see it anywhere till today. I think many of you didn’t knew about the ?? operator either. And by the way: it is part of C# since C# 2.0!

How often do you write code like this?

string a, b;
if (a == null)
    b = "some default value";
else
    b = a;

You have to check for null and use some default value if your object is null. The code can be written a little bit shorter with the ?: operator:

b = (a == null) ? "some default value" : a;

It’s nice but with the ?? operator it is much cooler:

b = a ?? "some default value";

Let me quote the msdn library: "The ?? operator returns the left-hand operand if it is not null, or else it returns the right operand."

You can use this operator with every object type and with every nullable type (like int?).