Using Ternary operations with nullable DateTime and null in C#

Type of conditional expression cannot be determined because there is no implicit conversion between between ‘<null>’ and ‘System.DateTime’

This post explains how to fix the error in the title when using a Ternary operation on a nullable DateTime variable with null as a possible outcome in C#.

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Background

For a project I was working on, I had some nullable DateTime properties that I needed to set in my business logic. To keep things simple, I’ll show a simplified example of a class with a nullable DateTime property:

Public Class MyClass 
{
    private DateTime? StartDate {get; set;}
}

Use-Case

As I wanted to be able to set its value depending on some business logistics I tried setting it using a Ternary operation. Just to keep my code mean and lean on this part:

var myInstance = new Myclass();
...
myInstance.StartDate =…