Question

When I have a method which returns a collection of objects, what I should return if the objects count is zero? null or just empty List<T>? What is good practice?

public List<string> GetPupilsByClass(string className)
{
     ....
}

Answer 1

I’d definitely return an empty list so methods can still be called on the object without requiring null checks. There’s a difference between returning an empty list and returning nothing at all, so the calling code probably isn’t expecting to receive a null reference anyway (unless an exception occurs or something).