C# 8.0 Nullable Reference in Practice

.NET Oxford

The most significant new feature of C# 8.0 is its support for non-nullable references. In a bid to mitigate what is often described as the "billion dollar mistake" of allowing references to be null, C#'s language designers have attempted to retrofit the ability to write code that declares unambiguously that it doesn't want nulls, and for the compiler to attempt to enforce that for you. Adding such a feature almost two decades into the life of the language and its supporting runtime was always going to be challenging, so this feature has quite a few quirks (such as its apparently inverted name).

In this talk, Ian Griffiths will describes the ins and outs of the new feature, with particular reference to his employer, endjin's experience with applying this new feature to existing code. In addition to an in-depth description of the technical details of nullable references, this talk will also describe strategies for migrating an existing codebase into the world of nullability-awareness.