Much Ado About Nothing

Ever since zero became something for nothing, you'd think we'd solved nothing. Whether we're talking NaN, string.Empty, nullables or database nulls, it turns out that nothing is more surprising than nothing. There is a distinction between a number that is zero — and the many ways we have of representing that number — and the absence of a thing, as well as a distinction between absence and emptiness. These distinctions have both practical and conceptual consequences that lead to surprises in code, in UX, in .NET and beyond. There are a non-zero number of things to learn in this talk about nothing.