Imagine any .NET codebase you have worked on. What would be the most common usage of if statement in this code? Given the notion of The Billion Dollar Mistake, I bet it is the null check. Reference types in .NET are allocated on the managed heap, so when an instance of such a type is assigned to a variable, this variable essentially points to an adress in this managed heap. The default value of such a variable is null, meaning that it points to nothing and can’t be dereferenced. For instance, if you write a method with a reference type argument, you can’t always predict how this method is going to be invoked and there is no guarantee that it won’t be a null value. To protect your code from an unexpected NullReferenceException, you would typically write something like this:
Coffee and Links #4
Happy New Year everyone and thank you for reading this blog!
I decided to slightly modify the format of this series, so that the posts have only 3-5 links, but carefully selected and more focused ones. Information overload isn’t a joke and trying to learn everything is often counterproductive (ask me how I know it), while picking your battles and practicing deep reading helps internalize things you read.
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