avoiding null reference exceptions

Question

Apparently the vast majority of errors in code are null reference exceptions. Are there any general techniques to avoid encountering null reference errors?

Unless I

Answer 1

You can easily check for a null reference before it causes an exception, but usually that is not the real problem, so you would just end up throwing an exception anyway as the code can't really continue without any data.

Often the main problem isn't the fact that you have a null reference, but that you got a null reference in the first place. If a reference is not supposed to be null, you shouldn't get past the point where the reference is initialised without having a proper reference.