Do you need C#, or do you only want .NET? If you can mix another .NET language, have a look at Oxygene. It's an amazing, very modern OO language that targets .NET (and also Java and Cocoa as well. Yep. All natively, it really is quite an amazing toolchain.)
Oxygene has a colon operator which does exactly what you ask. To quote from their miscellaneous language features page:
The Colon (":") Operator
In Oxygene, like in many of the languages it
was influenced by, the "." operator is used to call members on a class
or object, such as
var x := y.SomeProperty;
This "dereferences" the object contained in
"y", calls (in this case) the property getter and returns its value.
If "y" happens to be unassigned (i.e. "nil"), an exception is thrown.
The ":" operator works in much the same way, but instead of throwing
an exception on an unassigned object, the result will simply be nil.
For developers coming from Objective-C, this will be familiar, as that
is how Objective-C method calls using the [] syntax work, too.
... (snip)
Where ":" really shines is when accessing properties in a chain, where
any element might be nil. For example, the following code:
var y := MyForm:OkButton:Caption:Length;
will run without error, and
return nil if any of the objects in the chain are nil — the form, the
button or its caption.
