[🏫 In-Person] Null & Void - Everything about Nothing in .NET with Stefan Pölz

This event will be a single talk on Null & Void - Everything about Nothing in .NET with Stefan Pölz

✨ Stefan Pölz will be visiting from Vienna just before he does the same talk at NDC London, so this is a lifetime opportunity!

⚠️ This will be an in-person event, the venue is Sheffield Hallam University, Charles Street Building, Room 12.4.12. This is located on the 4th floor.

• 🗺️ Hallam University Map: https://www.shu.ac.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/city-campus-map
• 📌 Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kMU7RCsj3hdhWzXp9
• 🚗 Parking: The APCOA car park on Eyre Street is a five-minute walk from City Campus. You can park there for just £5. Just scan your blue chip at Owen Building Level 5, Charles Street, or Cantor to claim the discount.

Agenda:

• 🍕 Pizza/Drinks (18:15 - 18:30)
• 🗣 Introduction (18:30)
• 👉 Null & Void - Everything about Nothing (18:35ish)
• 🍻 Social @ Pub (after the talk)

👉 Null & Void - Everything about Nothing
System.NullReferenceException: 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object.'
I used to read this message quite almost every day.
But null references, also referred to as the "billion-dollar mistake" in that context, are also a great mechanism to express optionality and unavailability of a certain resource.

There are great tools to help us deal with ... utilize null pointers.
IDEs and Analyzers have introduced diagnostics which warn us at compile time about potential trouble at runtime.
And recently the magnificent C# 8.0 has brought us nullable reference types: a language feature which lets us annotate our API to clearly communicate the design intent of nullability.

So let's explore nullable reference types (including the accompanying nullable attributes of the BCL), their representation in both Reflection Metadata and the Roslyn API, and complement that with other available keywords and operators based on null. As a side effect, we will learn about the fundamental difference of nullable reference types and nullable value types in .NET. Additionally, we shall discover an alternative to null while still retaining the semantics of "nothing" - Spoiler: the null object pattern.