Moderately Clever .NET Trick #1

System.Nullable is an autoboxing wrapper that brings support for null values to types that normally don’t support null (like int). Not allowing nulls for value types in the first place is a bit of a pest (although I won’t elevate it to the level of “Stupid .NET Trick”, as I think there’s at least some legitimate reasoning behind it). System.Nullable is a hack to work around that but it’s relatively clean: You can use the wrapper class directly, or you can simply suffix your variable with a “?” (thus you get “int? x = null”, which nicely indicates that the variable is not your standard int).