Does it make sense to use “as” instead of a cast even if there is no null check? [closed]

by

In development blogs, online code examples and (recently) even a book, I keep stumbling about code like this:

var y = x as T;
y.SomeMethod();

or, even worse:

(x as T).SomeMethod();

That doesn’t make sense to me. If you are sure that x is of type T, you should use a direct cast: (T)x. If you are not sure, you can use as but need to check for null before performing some operation. All that the above code does is to turn a (useful) InvalidCastException into a (useless) NullReferenceException.

Am I the only one who thinks that this a blatant abuse of the as keyword? Or did I miss something obvious and the above pattern actually makes sense?

13 Answers
13

Leave a Comment