In ASP.NET web applications, I have found the null-forgiving operator to be useful for defining navigation properties, as in the following example.

Suppose we have two related tables, Course and Teacher.

In the definition of the Course class, we could have something like this:

public int TeacherID { get; set; }

public Teacher Teacher { get; set; } = null!;

The assignment in the second line, using the null-forgiving operator, allows Course.Teacher to be null in C# code, but not in the database, and that can be very useful.

Is there a better way to achieve the same effect?