B# .NET Blog

Welcome back to the Visual Basic 9.0 Feature Focus blog series. In this post, we'll cover the If Ternary Operator, which is a true ternary operator, something that Visual Basic has been lacking in previous releases (contrast to C-based languages' ?: operator). If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that you - as a seasoned VB developer - have already heard of (and been using) the Iif 'function' which is known as 'Immediate IF' (official KB source):

Dim i As Integer = 123
Dim sign As Integer = IIf(i < 0, -1, 1)

In the sample above, sign will be assigned the value '1' because i < 0 evaluates to false. If the condition would evaluate to true, the second parameter '-1' would become the output result. So what's wrong with this? Nothing but the color of Iif... I'm not kidding: the problem is in the color. Iif is not a built-in function but a regular function from some library, and therefore the Iif call is like a regular function call. Function calls cause all of the arguments to be evaluated in Visual Basic. Take a look at the following and try to predict the outcome:

Sub Main()
    Dim i As Integer = 123
    Dim sign As Integer = IIf(i < 0, Negative(), Positive())
    Console.WriteLine(sign)
End Sub

Function Negative() As Integer
    Throw New Exception("Oops!")
    Return -1
End Function

Function Positive() As Integer
    Return 1
End Function

Even though we're not interested in the Negative function call, it will still happen because all arguments to Iif need to be evaluated prior to calling Iif:

So, if you ever read the Iif is equivalent to the following, forget about it:

Sub Main()
    Dim i As Integer = 123
    Dim sign As Integer
    If i < 0 Then
        sign = Negative()
    Else
        sign = Positive()
    End If
    Console.WriteLine(sign)
End Sub

Instead this is what a real ternary operator should be equivalent to. Luckily we have one now in VB 9.0, and guess what: it's denoted as If too, just like its If-statement counterpart:

Sub Main()
    Dim i As Integer = 123
    Dim sign As Integer = If(i < 0, Negative(), Positive())
    Console.WriteLine(sign)
End Sub

Function Negative() As Integer
    Throw New Exception("Oops!")
    Return -1
End Function

Function Positive() As Integer
    Return 1
End Function

Trimmed of the I from IIf: color fixed and no side-effect anymore :-). But there's more to the ternary operator in Visual Basic: if it's used with only two arguments it acts as a null-coalescing operator, just as the ?? operator in C# (which was introduced in v2.0). This is especially useful if you're working with Nullable Types:

Dim name As String = Nothing
Dim nameValue = If(name, "Not set") 'will be "Not set"

name = "Bart"
nameValue = If(name, "Not set") 'will be "Bart"

Basically this use of the If operator is equivalent to:

nameValue = If(name IsNot Nothing, name, "Not set")

It works with everything that can be null, including Nullable Types:

Dim age As Integer? = Nothing
Dim ageValue = If(age, -1) 'will be -1

age = 24
age = If(age, -1) 'will be 24

Notice that the If operator requires its result operandi to be of "compatible types" so that the result type can be inferred:

Null coalescing proves useful if you need to switch from something nullable to something which isn't nullable but supports some kind of "default value" or "missing value".

Happy coding!