 <blockquote> <p>Then I began thinking: wouldn't it be useful if the default value of that business object was a null object instead of a null reference?</p> </blockquote> <p>It sounds like your project would benefit from using an IOC container that could inject a <code>NullBusinessObject</code> instance by default that does whatever you want it to do as default behavior. C# itself doesn't offer anything built in that you could override in this regard.</p>