? for C#? (aka C# might be getting a object hierarchy Safe Navigation Operator)

Jerry Nixon @ Work - At last, C# is getting “?.”, sometimes called the Safe Navigation Operator

Visual Studio (and many other Microsoft Products) uses http://UserVoice.com as a feedback mechanism for users to suggest and vote on product features. One of the most popular features, with 3,752 votes, a new “?.” operator for the C# language, sometimes called the Safe Navigation Operator.

The news

Rejoice. Yesterday, Tuesday, February 25, 2014, on the Visual Studio User Voice, Mads Torgersen, the C# Language PM, responded on behalf of the Visual Studio Project Team. He said, “We are seriously considering this feature for C# and VB, and will be prototyping it in the coming months.” ...

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What is it? Here’s the scenario

Consider getting the grandchild of a parent object like this:

var g1 = parent.child.child.child;

Okay, so, this is some poor coding because the value of child could be null....

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How the new operator works

Consider getting the grandchild of a parent object like this:

var g1 = parent?.child?.child?.child;
if (g1 != null) // TODO

Wow! ...

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Furthermore

Mad’s Visual Studio User Voice comment continued with a little more explanation of the operator’s implementation. He said, “If the type of e.x (etc) is a non-nullable value type S, then the type of e?.x is S?. Otherwise the type of e?.x is the same as that of e.×. If we can’t tell whether the type is a non-nullable value type (because it is a type parameter without sufficient constraints) we’ll probably give a compile-time error.” This comment, and the idea that a method call or indexer can be to the right of the operator are just candy.

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This operator would be pretty awesome and safe me a great deal of code... Wonder if we'll hear more about this at Build? Here's to hoping...