The simplicity of nullable types

I just discovered nullable types. Wow! They are really simple and such a powerful feature. Just see for yourself….

If you have an int or a DateTime or any other value type you’ll already know that you cannot assign null to them. But in C#2.0 you can.

You can define a nullable int by adding a question mark to the end of the type like this:

int? a = null;

However, you’ll want the new code to operate with old code which hasn’t yet been upgraded to use nullable types, so there is a new binary operator to help. The ?? (I’ve no idea how your meant to pronounce that. I just say “Double question mark”)

So, if you want to assign a (above) to a regular int you can do the following:

int b = a ?? -1;

If a is non-null then b is assigned the same value as a. If a is null then b is assigned the value on the right side of the ??. So, just like the old days where you’d make up a value to represent null for an integer (I normally used int.MinValue)

NOTE: This was rescued from the google cache. The original date was Friday, 9th June, 2006.

Tags: nullable type nullable c# value type