For the second installment of C# Basics, let’s take a look at the conditional operator, sometimes known as the ternary operator. How many times have you written code like this:

if (a == b)
{
  x = y;
}
else
{
  x = z;
}

Probably never, at least not quite this simplistic or with such ancient style variable names, or one would hope anyway. But the example serves its purpose. Now use the conditional operator and convert that code to this:

x = (a == b) ? y : z;

You can read more about the conditional operator on MSDN here.