Kijana Woodard

I find myself writing code like this a lot:

public static void DoSomething(Foo foo)
{
    var thing = foo == null ? null : foo.Thing;
}

I thought about adding an operator like ??? to go with ?? and ?, but you can’t do that in c# and it would probably be confusing to the next programmer anyway.

So how about an extension method to wrap that up:

public static class ObjectExtensionMethods
{
    public static TResult NullOr<T, TResult>(this T foo, Func<T, TResult> func)
    {
        if (foo == null) return default(TResult);
        return func(foo);
    }
}

//usage
public static void DoSomething(Foo foo)
{
    var value = foo.NullOr(f => f.Property);
}

Not a lot less typing, but a bit clearer and you’re less likely to screw up.