Can object constructor return a null?

Question

We have taken over some .NET 1.1 Windows Service code that spawns threads to read messages off a queue (SeeBeyond eGate JMS queue, but that is not important) and in turn spa

Answer 1

Edit: for clarification there is an insane edge case where you can get null from a class constructor, but frankly I don't think any real code should ever expect to deal with this level of crazy: What's the strangest corner case you've seen in C# or .NET? . To all normal intents : it won't happen.

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No, you can't get null from a class constructor (Thread is a class). The only case I know of where a constructor can (seem to) return null is Nullable - i.e.

object foo = new int?(); // this is null

This is a slightly bigger problem with generics:

static void Oops() where T : new() {
    T t = new T();
    if (t == null) throw new InvalidOperationException();
}

static void Main() {
    Oops();
}

(of course, there are ways of checking/handling that scenario, such as : class)

Other than that, a constructor will always either return an object (or initialize a struct), or throw an exception.