I cranked out a bunch of code tonight for my new nullable types approach. This is a .NET 1.1 solution, so it's pretty old school, but it was still fun. I explained the problem with our existing methods the other day. Basically, we have a ton of helper functions for dealing with nulls and empty strings across all of the data types. The methods are confusing and we haven't been using them correctly. We need a more sensible approach. After chatting with Marco, we came up with something like this: ...