C# Without Nulls or Exceptions

Sir Tony Hoare, the inventor of null, has called it his billion dollar mistake. “The Pragmatic Programmer” says that exceptions are “a kind of cascading goto”, which Edgar Dijkstra famously considered harmful. With so much of C# and the .Net framework built on these two concepts, code can quickly become littered with null checks and tightly coupled with exception catching. This talk is all about showing ways of writing and thinking about C# that can greatly reduce or remove null checks and exceptions. We’ll delve into why null is so dangerous, and see how code relying on exceptions can become entangled. Then we’ll see why an alternative approach produces code that has fewer defects, is more modular, is easier to test, and is easier to debug.

Speaker: Reid Evans will be be presenting this talk remotely.

Software Guild @ 7:30PM!

We are now having our .NET Meetup just before to the the Software Guild meetup on the same night. Our regular meetups will now be the last Wednesday of each month. This is great news as you can interact with more folks in our industry as well as get to consume another talk.

Giveaways: JetBrains!

We will be giving away a 1 year license to any JetBrains IDE or Tool. Thank you JetBrains for the support.

Networking: Feel free to join us afterwards at Craftheads for some refreshments while talking shop and socializing.

Contact: Derek Comartin (derek@codeopinion.com)

Cost: Free (Open to the public). Feel free to invite a friend!