This tip on using the double-quotation marks in C# helped me a bit today when it came to integrating new code for an ASP.Net web application with legacy data access code that I was unsure about the quality of. The data access code that I was referencing may or may not have null value checking, and there was no time because of an impending deadline to do code-review or quality control revision on it, but by using the ‘??’ check on values returned by it and some constant parameter values hydrated by web.config appSetting values II was able to implement default behaviour in my code for objects which did not get what was expected from the data access layer.
Of course this is just a band aid. The solution really lies in cleaning up that misbehaving code and defining standard contracts for behaviour between tiers that all the software team agrees to and which consistent code reviewing will reveal deviations from at earlier stages before integration, and perhaps the whole team becomes better developers because of it since we’re discipling ourselves on good practices for writing quality code.
