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> not as safe as the Objective-C approach where one can just send messages to nil[0] which is really awesome imo.

It's definitely NOT awesome. This stupid behaviour causes bugs all the time as you think you're doing an action but it's actually a no-op because something else failed and you get a nil. An NPE is awesome - it crashes immediately and you know exactly what is wrong. A silent no-op is the worst thing to debug.

Have you found C#'s null coalescing operator useful in these situations at all? I've found it to be quite handy.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173224.aspx

> I guess I kinda wonder if I could avoid the null checks in C# somehow

Without seeing your code it is hard to say, but using an object extension might work?

On many occasions I've used object extensions to hide checking code deep inside the extension.

C# really got that feature right.

Can you show an example of how this can be done?