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
