You could argue there are too many operators in C# as it is; however, I feel having an acute knowledge of the available operators is like knowing CTRL + B will bold the selected text in most word processing software.

To put it simply, it hurts no-one, whilst providing shortcuts to advanced users.

Consider the following:

if (MyObject != null)
{
    return MyObject;
}
else
{
    return SomeOtherObject;
}

In C# 2.0, the kind people at Microsoft provided the ?? operator to make this a much more sucinct:

return MyObject ?? SomeOtherObject;

One thing that I find ugly and boring in code is that of checking for nulls in nested object properties, so for a moderately extreme example:

Staff.Manager.PersonalDetails.Address.Location.Postcode

In order for me to be sure that I can access the “Postcode” part of this chain correctly (with the caviet that each of these proerty objects might be null) I’d have to write something like the following:

if (Staff != null && Staff.Manager != null &&
    Staff.Manager.PersonalDetails != null &&
    Staff.Manager.PersonalDetails.Address != null && .....
{

I’m sure you’ll agree the above is pretty ugly, especially if you don’t really care which property is null, just if any of them are.

So, I propose a new operator, the “Is anything in this chain null” operator, to be used something like so:

return ??{Staff.Manager.PersonalDetails.Address.Location.Postcode} : “No Postcode”

The actual syntax of this operator isn’t important, just the functionality.