Question

I can’t find a definitive answer. Since C# 2.0 you’ve been able to declare

int? i = 125; 

as shorthand for

Nullable<int> i = Nullable<int>(123); 

I recall reading somewhere that VB.NET did not allow this shortcut. But low and behold, I tried it in VS 2008 today and it works.

Does anyone know whether it’s been this way since .NET 2.0 or was this added later?

Answer 1

System.Nullable was introduced in .Net 2.0 and is available to VB as a generic type. You just cannot use the nullable syntax. So in VS 2005 you can do:

Dim x as Nullable(of Integer) 

I don’t know if null equivalence and boxing works for nullables in VB 2005, but I would suspect that the answer is yes since the .Net team made a change to the 2.0 CLR to accomplish boxing with nullables. I would imagine VB leverages this.

In 2008, you can obviously just do:

Dim x as Integer?