C# 6.0 null operator in a conditional statement

Question

From what I gathered with the new null operator in C# 6.0 you can do something like this:

string name = people.FirstOrDefault()?.FullName;

And this is great, but one verification I often come across is something like this:

object name = null;
if(name != null) {
    DoSomething();
} else {
    DoSomethingElse();
}

Given the purpose of the new null operator, I would like something like this should be possible:

if(name?) {
    DoSomething();
} else {
    DoSomethingElse();
}

The problem here from what I understood is that when the value the ? is checking is in fact null, it returns null, and you need a bool condition for the if statement. Since you can't directly convert a null to a bool, is there a simpler way of checking this without doing if(name != null) using the new null operator in C# 6.0?

Answer 1

There's no point in doing this. You're not doing any null coalescing in your example - you're simply checking for null.

A better use would be if you wanted to check some member of the name object. For example:

if (name?.FirstName != null) ...

But as you can see, it's still a simple comparison for null - we just used null coalescing to avoid having to write something like this:

if (name != null && name.FirstName != null) ...