Question

I am receiving unreachable code detected in my properties. This worked for regular string fields but not for DateTime data type.

private DateTime m_RenewalDate;
    public DateTime M_RenewalDate
            {
                get { return m_RenewalDate != null ? m_RenewalDate : DateTime.MinValue; }
                set { m_RenewalDate = value; }
            }

this is my sqldatareader

reader.GetDateTime(reader.GetOrdinal("M_RENEWALDATE"))

Answer 1

As driis said in his answer, m_RenewalDate == null is always false as DateTime is a value type and things declared to be value types cannot be null.

To have the get the behavior of returning DateTime.MinValue from M_RenewalDate in the case that M_RENEWALDATE is null your reader code should look more like this

object renewalDate = reader.GetValue(reader.GetOrdinal("M_RENEWALDATE"));

if (Equals(renewalDate, DBNull.Value))
{
    yourObject.M_RenewalDate = DateTime.MinValue;
}
else
{
    yourObject.M_RenewalDate = (DateTime) renewalDate;
}