Fortify your C# and Java code by having your signatures tell the truth with Option and Either

Learn how to make your API and method calls honest and more expressive by utilizing the Option and Either data wrappers and learn how to use those data structures.

In this hour we’ll talk about how to replace null, empty string, negative integers, and other “sentinel” values with Optional, how to use it once we’ve got one, and how to get your “optional” values back out.

We’ll also discuss a strategy to remove the throwing of exceptions in your code by using Either so we can get strongly typed error handling (thank you compiler!). We’ll see how to pass back exceptions when an error occurs (rather than throwing them) or how to remove them altogether and instead use expressive error values that are strongly typed.

We’ll see implementations of both structures in C# and Java and provide references to libraries in NuGet and Maven that already contain these data structures (and more!).