Handy extension method for null-coalesing

This content originally appeared on Posts on LINQ to Fail and was authored by Posts on LINQ to Fail

Today a colleague asked me a question: “How do you do a null-coalesce operator which will return a property of an object when not null?” If you’re not familiar with the null coalesce operator it’s the ?? operator and it can be used for inline expressions when the test object is null. You use it like so: string test = null; Console.WriteLine(test ?? "The string was null"); So it either returns itself or it returns your value, but what if you want to return a property of the object not itself, well you can’t use the ?

This content originally appeared on Posts on LINQ to Fail and was authored by Posts on LINQ to Fail