Question

I’m curious as to why the following code works (run under the VS debugger):

int? x = null;
null
x.HasValue
false

If x is indeed null, what instance does HasValue refer to? Is HasValue implemented as an extension method, or does the compiler special case this to make it magically work?

Answer 1

Because x isn’t a reference type. The ? is just syntactic sugar for Nullable<T>, which is a struct (value type).