Creating a nullable object via Activator.CreateInstance returns null

Question

I'm creating a system that turns a small script into a dll. I'm encountering a problem when I try to take a nullable value class and make it the default value of a parameter. The problem is that I need to create an instance of user selected nullable within the compiler and set it as the constant.

Unfortunately, whenever I use Activator.CreateInstance(NullableType) (where NullableType is a created type from user input) I get null as the return value. For example, simply executing:

object Test = Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(Nullable<int>));
Console.WriteLine(Test == null);

returns true. This ONLY happens with Nullables. A struct created in C#, even a generic one, is created fine. Heck, if I copy & paste nullable from DotNetReflector (and remove TypeDependencyAttribute, TargetPatchingOptOutAttribute, and ThrowHelper calls since I don't have access to those), it shows False above.

What is going on? Is there any other possible way to create a nullable when I don't know the generic parameters until run-time?

Answer 1

From this MSDN blog:

Activator.CreateInstance could never be expected to return null before; with this DCR, it will return null when creating instance of type Nullable but not providing non-null T value. For example, Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(Int32?)) returns null.

The problem has to do with how variables of Nullable<T> are boxed as explained by the blog post.

Answer 2

The problem is in ParameterBuilder.SetConstant, not Activator.CreateInstance. SetConstant is a function for defining the default value of an optional parameter, and requires a concrete value be provided as the constant. For ref classes, null is a valid concrete value, but for value classes prior to the creation of Nullable<>, null was not a valid value. How do you unbox null into an int, for example? So SetConstant checked value types to see if the concrete value passed in as the constant was null and throws an ArgumentException as a more descriptive error than the NullReferenceException you'd get for unboxing a null into a value class.

In the case of a Nullable<>, null is now a valid concrete value for a value class. Nullable<> itself is a value class, as seen with Activator.CreateInstance, and unboxing null into a Nullable<int> has meaning. This is where SetConstant has a bug: it fails to take this into account and throws a 'descriptive' error for what isn't actually an error. In lieu of a bugfix from Microsoft, any call to SetConstant with a null Nullable<> will have to implement the behavior that's guarded by the incorrect conditional. This means digging into ParameterBuilder's private methods and fields using reflection. Here's the code I made to handle just this case. The standard SetConstant function should be used in situations that don't manifest the bug.

//ModuleBuilder module : a parameter passed into the containing function, the module which is being built (which contains the method that has the optional parameter we are setting the constant for)
//ParameterBuilder optParam : A parameter passed into the containing function, the parameter that is being built which is to have the null default value.
MethodInfo method = typeof(TypeBuilder).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic)
    .Where(m => m.Name == "SetConstantValue" && m.GetParameters().Length > 0 && m.GetParameters()[0].ParameterType.Name == "RuntimeModule")
    .Single();
var RuntimeHandle = typeof(ModuleBuilder).GetMethod("GetNativeHandle", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
method.Invoke(null, new object[]
{
    RuntimeHandle.Invoke(module, new object[]{}),
    optParam.GetToken().Token,
    0x12,
    null
});

I have reported the bug to Microsoft. They responded that it wouldn't be fixed in .NET 3.5, but it was added to the internal bug database.

UPDATE:

The bug has been fixed in .NET 4.0. ParameterBuilder.SetConstant now has a branch to the constant == null conditional that checks to see if a value type is a generic derived from Nullable<> and only throws the exception if it is not.