Does The .NET "If" Operator Cause Boxing?

Those of us who've worked in VB/VB.NET have seen code similar to this abomination:

Dim name As String = IIf(obj Is Nothing, "", obj.Name)

I say "abomination" for three simple reasons:IIf is a function, all of whose parameters are evaluated; hence if obj is nothing in the above call then a NullReferenceException will be thrown. This is unexpected behavior for someone who's accustomed to short-circuited ternary operators in languages like C#.Because IIf is a function, it thus incurs the overhead of a function call. Again, though this isn't a big deal, it just doesn't feel right to someone who expects for it to behave as a ternary operation intrinsic to the language.IIf is non-generic and therefore accepts parameters of type Object, which means the following call boxes (I believe) a total of three integers:

' boxes 2nd and 3rd arguments as well as return value 'Dim value As Integer = IIf(condition, 1, -1)

Now, in some more recent version of VB.NET (I'm not sure what the number is), the If operator was introduced, which works exactly the same way as the IIf function but (as I understand it) without the same shortcomings. That is to say, it does provide short-circuiting and it is an intrinstic VB operation. However, I'm not sure about the last part. The MSDN documentation doesn't seem to indicate whether If boxes its arguments or not.