Short circuiting statement evaluation — is this guaranteed? [C#]

Question

Quick question here about short-circuiting statements in C#. With an if statement like this:

if (MyObject.MyArray.Count == 0 || MyObject.MyArray[0].SomeValu         


        

Answer 1

Just a small observation.

You said this:

Otherwise I'll get a null exception in the second part. (emphases mine)

This isn't true, actually. If short-circuiting weren't guaranteed, you could get an IndexOutOfRangeException in the second part.

It's still possible you could get a NullReferenceException, if the first item in your MyArray object is actually null (or if any of the other objects in that expression are).

The only totally safe check would be this:

bool conditionHolds =
    MyObject == null ||
    MyObject.MyArray == null ||
    MyObject.MyArray.Count == 0 ||
    MyObject.MyArray[0] == null ||
    MyObject.MyArray[0].SomeValue == 0;

if (conditionHolds)
{
    //....
}