Cleaning up conditional statements regarding new values

Please suggest ways of cleaning up this code.

Hashtable newValues = e.Values;

string NewPosition = null;
string NewFirst = null;
string NewLast = null;
string NewEmail = null;
int NewAppt = 0;

if (newValues["Position"] == null)
{
    NewPosition = "";
}
else
{
    NewPosition = newValues["Position"].ToString();
}

if (newValues["First Name"] == null)
{
    NewFirst = "";
}
else
{
    NewFirst = newValues["First Name"].ToString();
}

if (newValues["Last Name"] == null)
{
    NewLast = "";
}
else
{
    NewLast = newValues["Last Name"].ToString();
}

if (newValues["Email"] == null)
{
    NewEmail = "";
}
else
{
    NewEmail = newValues["Email"].ToString();
}

if (newValues["Appts"] == null)
{
    NewAppt = 0;
}
else
{
    NewAppt = 1;
}

You can use the null-coalescing operator ?? like this:

NewPosition = (newValues["Position"] ?? "").ToString();

The core of this approach is this expression:

newValues["Position"] ?? ""

The ?? operator evaluates the left expression first (i.e. newValues["Position"]), and uses it as the result if it's not null. If the first expression is null, the second expression is evaluated, and its result is returned as the overall result of the expression.

For the last one, use ?:

NewAppt = (newValues["Appts"] != null) ? 1 : 0;

StackExchange Code Review Q#15928, answer score: 15