Don’t understand nullable reference types

Documentation says that non-nullable reference types “must be initialized to a non-null value” and “compiler issues a warning when code assigns maybe-null”

Yet in the picture which is from a dotnet entity framework video, they just set firstname and lastname, non-nullable reference types, to null

How? It says you can’t initialize to null value

null! essentially forces the compiler to shut up about nullability warning.

You can set non-nullable reference types to null just fine, it's just the compiler which will warn you about it.

But if you say "shut up" to the compiler then it won't complain

Thank you. I dont see why you would want to lose the warnings? If you don’t want the warnings and can still set it to null, why not use a nullable reference type?

So the “?” only affects compiler warnings and doesn’t affect the behavior of the variable?

For reference types, yes

Sometimes you have a situation (like with EF) where you don't have an initial value to set anything to, but you know for certain that the value won't be null when you actually access it.

EF will set those values for you before you can properly access them

Answered before I could ask, are you saying it has a default constructor? If you don’t initialize firstname for example, will it just make it white space?

Strings are by default null

All reference types are by default null

But you said “EF will set those values for you before you can properly access them”. I’m talking in that scenario.

I mean that when you access a model, EF with have initialized it already