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Null Hot Potato

First, full credit for the term “Null Hot Potato” goes to Reid Evans.  He was presenting his talk “C# Without Nulls or Exceptions” at our local Windsor-Essex .NET Developers group.  I don’t want to give away the talk, because I hope it gets posted online so you can watch it yourself.  But I do want to dive into this one specific thing that Reid described as of the Null Hot Potato. Not My Problem It’s really a case of passing the responsibility.  If your method handles null with null checks, but returns null, your just “passing the buck”.  You’re basically… Read More »Null Hot Potato

Porting to Entity Framework Core

I’ve used the newer Entity Framework Core on a couple projects just to give it a test drive in the v1.0 era.  It felt very similar to Entity Framework 6.  I figured since it seemed so similar, porting wouldn’t be too difficult.  So I bit the bullet and finally decided to port an application that uses Entity Framework 6 over to Entity Framework Core 2.0.  Here is a bit of an experience report on porting to Entity Framework Core. Side by Side In theory, you should be able to run EF 6 along side EF Core.  They are completely different… Read More »Porting to Entity Framework Core

Avoiding the NullReferenceException

Easily, by a landslide, the most common exception I’ve run into in C# is the NullReferenceException.  Second would be an InvalidOperationException.  But NullReferenceException wins as most occurred exception hands down.  This quick post shows how we can start avoiding the NullReferenceException. I despise null.  I despise null checks.  What if there was a way to get rid of null checks?  Luckily there is. Last year I was at a talk by Reid Evans, Getting Started with Functional Programming in F#.   He touched on it and I’ve been using an implementation in C# ever since. Option an option type or maybe type is a polymorphic type that represents… Read More »Avoiding the NullReferenceException