Is it better to return null or empty collection?

Question

That\'s kind of a general question (but I\'m using C#), what\'s the best way (best practice), do you return null or empty collection for a method that has a collection as a

Answer 1

If an empty collection makes sense semantically, that's what I prefer to return. Returning an empty collection for GetMessagesInMyInbox() communicates "you really do not have any messages in your inbox", whereas returning null might be useful to communicate that insufficient data is available to say what the list that might be returned ought to look like.