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What was the design decision behind NullReferenceException not containing any runtime specific information except base class data (like a stacktrace)? And is there an extension for Visual Studio that can tell you straight away which part of an expression was null?
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You can eliminate the exception by declaring the number of elements in the array before initializing it, as the following example does. For more information on declaring and initializing arrays, see Arrays and Arrays. You get a null return value from a method, and then call a method on the returned type.
So, a reference is what a variable of a reference type contains. These variables can point to “nothing”, though, and that's what we call a null reference: a reference that doesn't point to any object. When you try to call a method or another member on the said variable, you got the NullReferenceException.
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. This exception is thrown when you try to access any properties / methods/ indexes on a type of object which points to null.
The best way to avoid the "NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object” error is to check the values of all variables while coding. You can also use a simple if-else statement to check for null values, such as if (numbers!= null) to avoid this exception.
An NRE is a very low-level exception. It is a hardware exception (a 'trap') generated by the processor when it is asked to read data from an address below 64K. That region of the virtual memory space is always unmapped, specifically to trap pointer bugs. It starts as an AccessViolation and gets turned into NRE by the CLR when the address is less than 0x00010000. At that point there is very little context for the exception, all that's known is the address of the machine code instruction that caused the trap.
Reverse-engineering that machine code instruction address back to a named variable in your program isn't possible. It is important that it works that way, a jitter would have to generate very inefficient code otherwise. All that can be reasonably done is recover the source code line number. That requires debugging info (a .pdb) that contains line number info. The CLR knows how to read the .pdb file and uses it to generate the exception's stack trace. However, this is often still inaccurate due to optimizations performed by the JIT optimizer, it moves code around. You'll only get a guaranteed match for the Debug build. The reason why the PDB for the Release build doesn't contain source line number info. You can change that.
This problem has a very simple solution. Check for null yourself and generate your own exception before letting the runtime do it. The test is quite cheap, well less than a nanosecond.
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