C# null coalescing operator returning null

Question

Recently my co-worker showed me a block of code that was not working correctly:

public class SomeClass
{
    private IList _categories;

    publ         


        

Answer 1

This could happen because you have optimizations turned on - in that case the assignment may be delayed for as long as the compiler can demonstrate that doing so doesn't change the result. Of course, this looks weird in the debugger, but it's perfectly OK.