#null-coalescing operator

What is the purpose of ?? operator in C#?

The ?? operator is called the null-coalescing operator. It returns the left-hand operand if the operand is not null; otherwise, it returns the right-hand operand.

You might already know that C# 2.0 provides us Nullable Types which can be used to store null values for value type variables such as int, float, decimal etc.

For example, let’s consider the following code snippet.

[csharp] int? x = null;