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Who doesn’t love LINQ? Who doesn’t love extension methods in .NET?

Unfortunately, Microsoft could have made things easier for developers by handling nulls gracefully. What do I mean? Take the following code as an example:

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IEnumerable<int> numbers = null;
if (numbers.Any()) {
}

Obviously, as a programmer you would know that you should get a NullReferenceException from the above code. Below is the correct way to write that function:

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IEnumerable<int> numbers = null;
if ((numbers != null) && (numbers.Any())) {
}

Simple and logical fix, but it’s just “noisy”. When dealing with an extension method, I disagree with how null references were handled in the LINQ libraries. Any extension function should detect null and return early (when possible). I believe that Microsoft’s view and defense is that an IEnumerable should never be “null” but instead be an empty collection.

Below is the decompiled implementation of the .Any() LINQ extension method (courtesy of .Net Reflector v6).

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[__DynamicallyInvokable]
public static bool Any<TSource>(this IEnumerable<TSource> source)
{
  if (source == null) {
    throw Error.ArgumentNull("source");
  }
  using (IEnumerator<TSource> enumerator = source.GetEnumerator()) {
    if (enumerator.MoveNext()) {
      return true;
    }
  }
  return false;
}

The following simple change to the above method would remove all of that extra “noise” and make our code easier to read.

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[__DynamicallyInvokable]
public static bool Any<TSource>(this IEnumerable<TSource> source)
{
  if (source == null) return(false);
  using (IEnumerator<TSource> enumerator = source.GetEnumerator()) {
    if (enumerator.MoveNext()) {
      return true;
    }
  }
  return false;
}

Of course, the other solution (and recommended best practice) is to not return null from a function that returns an IEnumerable, but to instead return an empty collection. Unfortunately, when dealing with other people’s code or libraries you may not have that luxury. Below is a simple and efficient example of how to NOT return null for an IEnumerable result. Please note that the example is contrived and a String.Split function already exists.

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public IEnumerable<string> Split(string input, string value) {
  if (input == null) return(new string[0]);
  ...
}

So when you’re writing you own extension methods in .NET, do the world a favor and handle null much better.