>Not sure I understand that. If they're initialized to an empty value then how can they ever be null? I also wonder about the comparison you were doing to DBNull.Value ... I don't believe you can compare a string to DBNull.Value. Well, not in C# anyway ... maybe VB is more lax about that?

The method initializes a local variable to empty. But, the parameter received maybe null, empty or contains a value. Thus, in the method, I only need to verify if it is not null. If that is the case, then the variable is set to it.