Lamenting Nullable support in ADO.NET

I've been using .NET 2.0 heavily since it hit beta1. However, in my old job, I rarely had need to interact with ADO.NET- that was usually someone else's job. In a startup, pretty much everything is "your job"- I've done more ADO.NET in the last 3 weeks than in the prior six years of using .NET... Gotta say, I'm super-bummed that the data provider model wasn't updated to better support Nullable. Granted, in the days before nullable valuetypes, DBNull was a decent compromise for detecting nulls. But inlining code for dealing with DBNull into otherwise simple expressions leaves me feeling dirty and ashamed.

I understand that dealing with nullable types is a function best handled by the individual providers (especially considering the difference in semantics between backends), and I'm sure support will come with time. However, I'm especially disappointed that the Convert class, normally the "hero to the rescue" around DBNull, was also not updated. There's no ConvertToNullableInt32(...) or anything of the sort- we're left with rolling our own conversion methods or inlining things like:

int? MyNullableInt = reader["anInt"] is DBNull ? null : reader["anInt"];

Ick. I feel like I need a shower right now just having typed it. I'm hoping LINQ to SQL will support nullables in a more friendly manner (I seem to recall that it does, but I won't find out for sure until Orcas hits beta- don't have the bandwidth to mess with it now).

I found this recently, which looks similar to what I was considering writing... Still need to peek inside to see if I feel comfortable using it, but there's not really much to it. This covers half of what's missing. The other half is in the parameter type inference model used by individual providers. For instance, the following code breaks:

int? someIntValue = 5;

SqlCeParameter parm = new SqlCeParameter("@MYINT", someIntValue);

since the SqlCeParameter class has a hardcoded list of conversions to its internal datatypes, and Nullable<int> isn't in it. Again, this behavior is understandable- SQL CE has to work on 1.x CLRs, but that doesn't make me feel much better when I live in 2.0.

Oh well. I'm off the soapbox for tonight.