Ordinarily I like to pontificate on the merits (or detriments) of particular code design decisions. Instead today, I’d like to share a neat consequence of C# 6 that I found the other day.
We’re all familiar with the null-conditional operator ?. when accessing members (properties/functions). What you may not immediately see is the ability to use the ? when accessing an object via indexers. Check it out:
var value = myObj?[5];
As you might expect, this line of code returns myObj[5] when myObj is not null, or null if it is.
What I find interesting is that reading the code, it makes sense, but it’s not something that I immediately considered when learning about the ?. operator.
I guess what’s really happening here is that the real operator isn’t ?. but merely ?. After this operator, you can access the data on the object, and it magically checks for null before proceeding with the access!
After writing this, I thought it sounded like I’m a total noob to .Net. I don’t even care. It’s nice that I can still learn basic things.