Singleton shortcut

26 Aug 2009 1 mins .NET, C#

Probably every developer sometimes heard about the singleton pattern. I’ll be not far from truth that you’re probably writing it like this:

class Foo1
{
	private static Foo1 _instance;
	public static Foo1 Instance
	{
		get
		{
			if (_instance == null)
				_instance = new Foo1();
			return _instance;
		}
	}
}

I do it same way. But today I seen little bit different way. It’s using the C# coalesing operator and some C-like magic syntax.

class Foo2
{
	private static Foo2 _instance;
	public static Foo2 Instance
	{
		get
		{
			return _instance ?? (_instance = new Foo2());
		}
	}
}

Looks cool, isn’t it? On the other hand I’ll probably use the first one, as it’s more readable, at least for me.

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.