If, IIf() and If()

Question

I recently asked a question about IIf vs. If and found out that there is another function in VB called If which basically does the same thing as IIf

Answer 1

One very important distinct between IIf() and If() is that with Option Infer On the later will implicitly cast the results to the same data type in certain cases, as where IIf will return Object.

Example:

    Dim val As Integer = -1
    Dim iifVal As Object, ifVal As Object
    iifVal = IIf(val >= 0, val, Nothing)
    ifVal = If(val >= 0, val, Nothing)

Output:
iifVal has value of Nothing and type of Object
ifVal has value of 0 and type of Integer, b/c it is implicitly converting Nothing to an Integer.