Wouldn't float.IsNaN(x) be a more readable way to achieve that?

Some people in this thread seem to believe that the cool language features in C# 3.0 are only available when using .NET 3.5. This is not true. You can build a .NET 2.0 application in Visual Studio 2008 and use most of the features new to C# 3.0: - Lambda expressions - Automatic type inferral using the 'var' keyword - Object and collection initializers - Extension methods (although this requires a hack[^]. - Anonymous types However, if you want to use Linq, you're gonna have to move to .NET 3.5. There is another MAJOR drawback to moving to 3.5 which hasn't been mentioned yet. .NET 3.5 does not support Windows 2000. I can see whiy it's harder to support WPF on Windows 2000, but I can't imagine why it would be impossible to host LINQ on a Windows 2000 machine. This no doubt has to do with Microsoft pushing adoption of its newer OSes.

I believe this is what you are looking for:

void SomeFunction(ref object[] updateList) {
if(updateList == null) {
updateList = new object[10];
}
}