Trace logging with nLog (or similar) - how to deal with null

Question

I recently started on a contract role.

 

The idea is to take full ownership of a bunch of  applications. Since there is virtually no technical documentation I've been going through the code, and adding trace logging (with NLog) where it seems appropriate.

 

A lot of the code however consists of the execution of stored procs and simply passing through dataset objects, like this:

Factory.GetArchiveDataAccess().NothandledUpdate(AppSetting.StatusArchive.StatusNotHandled.GetHashCode(), Machine.DecConfigId);

NewArchives.NewArchivesDataSet = Factory.GetArchiveDataAccess().NewArchives().ResultSet;

 //  Trace
 if (NewArchives.NewArchivesDataSet != null && NewArchives.NewArchivesDataSet.Tables.Count > 0)
 {
   _logger.Trace($"Returns {NewArchives.NewArchivesDataSet.Tables[0].Rows.Count}");
}
else
{
   _logger.Trace("NewArchives.NewArchivesDataSet does not contain data");
}

 At the moment, when I want to show if a strored proc found data or not I'm forced to add a bunch of tests to avoid exceptions.

 

Isn't there a cleaner way of achieving this?