Ordinarily I like to pontificate on the merits (or detriments) of particular code design decisions. Instead today, I’d like to share a neat consequence of C# 6 that I found the other day.
We’re all familiar with the null-conditional operator ?. when accessing members (properties/functions). What you may not immediately see is the ability to use the ? when accessing an object via indexers. Check it out:
var value = myObj?[5];
As you might expect, this line of code returns myObj[5] when myObj is not null, or null if it is.
What I find interesting is that reading the code, it makes sense, but it’s not something that I immediately considered when learning about the ?. operator.
I guess what’s really happening here is that the real operator isn’t ?. but merely another use for ?(the other use being the conditional operator which is combined with :). After this operator, you can access the data on the object, and it magically checks for null before proceeding with the access!
After writing this, I thought it sounded like I’m a total noob to .Net. I don’t even care. It’s nice that I can still learn basic things.
Coding for Smarties 
I think the biggest difference between coders you like working with and coders you don’t is directly related to how willing they are to learn.
Some guys learn a lot and can’t be taught, and others realize there’s way too much to learn and no one can ever know it all.
Just this week, I’ve learned a few things about MEF I’ve never known and I’ve been using it since around 2010. Who knew?
I wish I could say I knew this, but I too thought the operator was ?. and it never occurred to me to use it differently. How did you discover this index accessibility feature?
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It was just one of those “What does this button do?” moments. I had an array that I was trying to index, but I received a NullReferenceException. I thought, “I wonder if this works…” and it did.
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Score! Thanks for sharing.
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