Question

I’ve been finding several bugs in my project that are due to enums being null, instead of one of the enumerated values. Is there a way to guarantee that a variable of this type will always be initialized with one of the enumerated values, and never be null?

Answer 1

No. Enums are always reference types, and null is a valid value for any reference type. You can always write:

MyEnum x = null;

and if you have an instance or static variable which isn’t initialized explicitly, it will always default to null.