Ok this might be a bit of hack but bear with me :) The background is that i'm tired of methods that that some if-statement to that messes up indention for the whole method, like:

public SomeClass DoStuff(string inputStr)
{
  SomeClass result =null;
  if (IsOpenFilter(inputStr))
  {
    ....
  }

  return result;
}

So I was thinking , wouldn't it be neat if I could do something like this instead:

public SomeClass DoStuff(string inputStr)
{
  Require(IsOpenFilter(inputStr),null);


  ....

  return result;
}

The idea is that if the statement does not evaluates to true it would return null. If there wasn't a return type for the method it would simply be: Require(IsOpenFilter(inputStr));

I realize that this is kinda overlapping with code contracts but these would be more like "conditional" or "soft" contracts evaluated at runtime rather than compile time.

So I guess there's two questions, can this be done somehow? I'm stumped on how to do a conditional return from calling a method.

The other question is, is this a good idea? It's a bit weird to monkeypatch the language like this but I'd rather like the way the code reads. I would be even cleaner if it could be put into an attribute above the method: [Require(IsOpenFilter(inputStr))]