The ”as” operator in C#

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t see people using the “as” operator in C# a lot when I read code. It’s a shame, because it’s really nifty. For example, you can use it like this when you retrieve something from the cache:

string s = Cache[cacheKey] as string;
if(s != null) {
    return s;
}
else {
    // Set s to a new value
    Cache[cacheKey] = s;
    return s;
}

This way you don’t have to explicitly check the type of the cache contents. If it can’t be casted, s will just contain null instead.