Should I use `!IsGood` or `IsGood == false`?

Question

I keep seeing code that does checks like this

if (IsGood == false)
{
   DoSomething();
}

or this

if (IsGood == true)
{
   D         


        

Answer 1

I would prefer shorter variant. But sometimes == false helps to make your code even shorter:

For real-life scenario in projects using C# 2.0 I see only one good reason to do this: bool? type. Three-state bool? is useful and it is easy to check one of its possible values this way.

Actually you can't use (!IsGood) if IsGood is bool?. But writing (IsGood.HasValue && IsGood.Value) is worse than (IsGood == true).

Play with this sample to get idea:

bool? value = true; // try false and null too

if (value == true)
{
    Console.WriteLine("value is true");
}
else if (value == false)
{
    Console.WriteLine("value is false");
}
else
{
    Console.WriteLine("value is null");
}

There is one more case I've just discovered where if (!IsGood) { ... } is not the same as if (IsGood == false) { ... }. But this one is not realistic ;) Operator overloading may kind of help here :) (and operator true/false that AFAIK is discouraged in C# 2.0 because it is intended purpose is to provide bool?-like behavior for user-defined type and now you can get it with standard type!)

using System;

namespace BoolHack
{
    class Program
    {
        public struct CrazyBool
        {
            private readonly bool value;

            public CrazyBool(bool value)
            {
                this.value = value;
            }

            // Just to make nice init possible ;)
            public static implicit operator CrazyBool(bool value)
            {
                return new CrazyBool(value);
            }

            public static bool operator==(CrazyBool crazyBool, bool value)
            {
                return crazyBool.value == value;
            }

            public static bool operator!=(CrazyBool crazyBool, bool value)
            {
                return crazyBool.value != value;
            }

            #region Twisted logic!

            public static bool operator true(CrazyBool crazyBool)
            {
                return !crazyBool.value;
            }

            public static bool operator false(CrazyBool crazyBool)
            {
                return crazyBool.value;
            }

            #endregion Twisted logic!
        }

        static void Main()
        {
            CrazyBool IsGood = false;

            if (IsGood)
            {
                if (IsGood == false)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Now you should understand why those type is called CrazyBool!");
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

So... please, use operator overloading with caution :(