Re:The future of C# and Visual Basic [video]
by Pxtl on Monday November 03, 2014 @12:55PM
(#8552253)
Yes, that's the obviously implementation, but so many older framework libs that have not been replaced still use serializers that, when given a Nullable type, fail to use that obvious implementation and blow up on empty strings.
In the case of the XML Serializer, that means that if I declare a class with Nullable<int> Foo {get;set;}
and
<Foo />
appears in the XML body, then it blows up. The WebForms stuff is similarly pathetic about empty strings. There is no useful distinction between empty strings and nulls when we're talking about dates or numbers or something like that, so throwing an exception in this case is just plain wrong. It's not even protecting backwards compatibility because pre-2.0 C# didn't even have nullable ints.
In the case of the XML Serializer, that means that if I declare a class with Nullable<int> Foo {get;set;}
and
appears in the XML body, then it blows up. The WebForms stuff is similarly pathetic about empty strings. There is no useful distinction between empty strings and nulls when we're talking about dates or numbers or something like that, so throwing an exception in this case is just plain wrong. It's not even protecting backwards compatibility because pre-2.0 C# didn't even have nullable ints.