You can always tell the guys who came from the world of C / C++
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They're the ones who actually check for null before using an object. I've found that it's comparatively rare in the C# world to see this test as a standard coding practice. Who knows, maybe tripping over a null value is less evil in today's condom protected world of managed software development (and I'm talking about the programmers, not the code, being "managed") than it used to be. Try a stunt like that in the world of C and you might trash memory that you later regret. Loss of data, screw up the OS, spontaneously reboot the machine... shucks, there's just all sorts of havoc that a wild pointer can do in C. And don't even get me started on wild programmers. Maybe the memory management in .net makes it less hazardous to access a null object, but it sure as hell isn't any less embarrassing. I mean, it's bad enough if you do decent error handling / reporting and give the user a message that says, "Damn. That was embarrassing. Care to try again now that we're sober?" But to get a YSOD or system popup message saying something arcane about a null value being encountered is just amateur hour. Nowhere is this more prevalent than the world of client side javascript, something I've successfully avoided for years. Now that I'm digging into it a bit, it's just amazing to me the degree of half assed techniques, cryptic, one letter names, untested variables and other such grade school level sloppiness in what should be professionally written code. Write code like that in any other part of the system in a decent development shop and you may have a brief and unexpected encounter with the Exit sign. But as long as you're only writing javascript, I guess it's okay. I mean, it's not like a customer would see an embarrassing error message pop up out of their browser and make your company look stupid or anything. Actually, though it sounds like I'm cranky and having a bad day, at the moment I'm nose deep in a personal project and having quite the good time. But sometimes you just wanna whack someone upside the head with a whiteboard eraser, you know? :-D
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer Watch Bad Programmer! - Premieres May, 2011
I feel your pain. One of the problems I see people running the most (and myself when using other people's code) is the NullReferenceException. Although I have some C/C++ background, it's not one with lots of experience, but I don know that checking for null is a very good practice. It surprises me that some people try to argue against checking for null saying: "But it will never be null! You don't need to check that!", and often these people don't realize all possible ways a variable can become null or never instantiated. And the same people complain over and over because they don't know why such an exception is being thrown :doh: Good thing I don't have a JS background, I'd hate to have created nasty habits like the ones possible in JS.