Eliminating Nulls in C# with Functional Programming

This is a short and sweet article showing how the Option class can bring functional programming concepts to C# codebases and prevent null reference exceptions.

This article will be using the extremely popular language-ext library as the most popular .NET functional programming library built for object oriented languages (aside from F#).

Installing the Language-Ext Library

In order to work with the language-ext library, you will need to add a NuGet reference to the package. This can be done via NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio or by running Install-Package LanguageExt.Core from the package manager console.

What is an Option?

Options are a reference type that either contain some value or have none. As an example, look at the following method that searches a dictionary and returns a value from it:

In this method, since the return type is Option<ResumeKeyword>, the return type will either be of Some<ResumeKeyword> or None. The…