Lazy instantiation one-liner of instance fields with the coalesce operator
It is hardly worth blogging, but…
Did you know that the return value of an assignment is the assignment? i.e.
class Person {
public string Name;
}
...
Person p;
Console.WriteLine((p = new Person()).Name);
And did you know there is a coalesce operator since .NET 2.0 that will return the left-hand side if not null, or the right-hand side if the left-hand is null?
a ?? b;
If you combine these information snippets you get the modern one-liner for lazy instantiation of instance fields:
Person p;
public Person Example {
get {
return p ?? (p = new Person());
}
}