If you’ve read blog posts or even MSDN articles explaining new features in C# 6.0 – I’m sure you’ve learned that the null-conditional operator in C# 6.0 will help you to greatly reduce the number of hard-to-debug and hard-to-reproduce NullReferenceException-s.

When I first read about this operator, the only thing that registered in my mind was that it helped you to chain null checks, especially for descending into data structures, and short-circuit the rest of the checks as soon as you hit null somewhere in the chain. So, I thought it was just a mere convenient syntactic sugar.

But I still did not completely understood the true power of this operator. I’m usually pretty meticulous about null checks and have a lot of C# 5.0 code like this:

private static int GetCurrentSpeed(Car car)
{
	if (car != null && car.Engine != null && car.Engine.ControlUnit != null)
	{
		return car.Engine.ControlUnit.CurrentSpeed;
	}

	return 0;
}

And I was debating whether it was worth it to go through the code base and refactor it to use null-conditional operator. Would I gain anything? Was it worth it just to have the code to look like this:

private static int GetCurrentSpeed(Car car)
{
	return car?.Engine?.ControlUnit?.CurrentSpeed ?? 0;
}

Okay, I cut 5 lines of code, what’s the big deal?

Continue reading “Null-Conditional Operator in C# 6.0” →