I last posted about the null coalescing operator in .NET 2.0 and just had to post a follow up. I came accross a post on Born 2 Code .NET (via Dennis van der Stelt) where several examples of ?? syntactic sugar are listed to demonstrate how the null coalescing operator surpasses the ternary conditional operator (?:) and if constructs as far as usefulness and readability.

Here's a great sample from the post:

public Brush BackgroundBrush
{
    get
    {
        return _backgroundBrush ??
        (
            _backgroundBrush = GetBackgroundBrushDefault()
        );
    }
}

Which translates to (using a traditional if construct)

public Brush BackgroundBrush
{
    get
    {
        if (_backgroundBrush == null)
        {
            _backgroundBrush = GetBackgroundBrushDefault();
        }
        return _backgroundBrush;
    }
}

The idea here is that the ?? is evaluated first before the return, causing the assignment to occur in the case when the _backgroundBrush variable is null. That is just plain cool. Make sure you check out the link to the post on Born 2 Code .NET for more examples. Also check out Jon Skeet's post on doing elegant comparisons using the null coalescing operator as well.