Detecting what the target object is when NullReferenceException is thrown

Question

I\'m sure we all have received the wonderfully vague \"Object reference not set to instance of an Object\" exception at some time or another. Identifying the object that is

Answer 1

There's really not much you can do besides look at the stack trace; if you're dereferencing multiple object references in the same line of code, there's no way to determine which one is null without setting a breakpoint. You could avoid this by only dereferencing one object per line, but that would result in some pretty terrible-looking code.