TimL on C#.NET

As discussed in previous posts, C# now has the concept of nullable value types via the ? operator. When used correctly, they can be very useful and solve some problems. But, quite honestly, I feel that they're kind of "hackish" to use them in public methods and interfaces. In many cases, you can simply make a few quick overloads to cleanup things up a bit.

Conside, for example, a class with the following public method that uses a paremeter of type int?.

public void MyMethod(int? myParameter)
{
   ...
}

 

Rather than exposing that method for use by others, it could instead be made private and we could define a couple of public overloads.

public void MyMethod()
{
    MyMethod();
}

public void MyMethod(int myParameter)
{
    MyMethod(myParameter as int?);
}

private void MyMethod(int? myParameter)
{
   ...
}

 

That code is pretty straight forward. The only trick is to cast the parameter as a int? before calling the private overload that does all the work. If you do not do that, then you will very quickly encounter a stack overflow.