Ternary Operator

I have come to become a big fan of the ternary operator... It's quite useful for replacing simple if-else statements. Ternary operator template:

  ( true/false expression to evaluate ) ? (true evaluation) : (false evaluation) ;

E.g.

  Boolean IsMoCool = false;
  String s = ( IsMoCool ) ? "Mo is cool" : "Mo is not cool";
  Console.WriteLine( s );

Can you predict the result? This should print "Mo is not cool" to the console window. This happens for 2 reasons, the first is the "IsMoCool" value is initialized as false. So when the statement ( IsMoCool ) evaluated it yields a false value and executes the false condition. The 2nd reason this works is because mO is not cool! Here is maybe a better usage of the ternary operator... Let's say I have the following code...

  public class TernaryDemo 
  {
      private object _myObject;

      public object MyObject 
      {
          get 
          {
              if( null == _myObject ) 
              {
                  _myObject = new object( );
              }
              return _myObject;
          }
      }
  }

This could be re-written as....

  public class TernaryDemo 
  {
      private object _myObject;

      public object MyObject 
      {
          // if _myObject hasn't been constructed yet then create an instance,        
          // otherwise return the constructed instance.        
          get { return ( null == _myObject ) ? _myObject = new object( ) : _myObject; }
      }
  }

Recently, I came across the ?? operator added in C# 2.0. Here's how (I think) it works...

  private string _s;

  public void MyMethod( ) 
  {
      string s = ( null == _s ) ? "Some Clever Text Here" : _s;
  }

The above code can be re-written using ?? like this...

  private string _s;

  public void MyMethod( ) 
  {
      string s = _s ?? "Some Clever Text Here";
  }

The ?? operator implicitly does the same operation as the ternary operator but looks much cleaner.