The Golden Rule of Programming

"If database connection can be null, it will be null."

Would that we could all just up and switch programming languages at the drop of a hat like that.

Explicitly defining what is ever allowed to be 'null' is a great habit that serves me extremely well during evenings and weekends. But it's completely useless to me, by virtue of being impossible, between 9am and 5pm.

That's some Jedi Master type of rule right there.

It is the exception that proves the rule!

Sorry, MySQL and word press couldn't take the traffic I guess :-(

Value types are non-nullable. But they're also stack-allocated* and passed by value, so they're really only appropriate in certain cases. You can't use them as general-purpose non-nullable objects.

*In practice, though technically that bit's an implementation detail of Microsoft's run-time and not part of the language spec.

For some data types. Strings and objects can always be nullable.

For me, it's more of a "general rule" than a "golden rule".