Professional Visual Studio® 2008

12.1. Object and Array Initialization

With the introduction of the .NET Framework, Microsoft moved developers into the world of object-oriented design. However, as you no doubt will have experienced, there are always multiple class designs with quite often no one right answer. One such open-ended example is the question of whether to design your class to have a single parameterless constructor, multiple constructors with different parameter combinations, or a single constructor with optional parameters. This choice is often dependent on how an instance of the class will be created and populated. In the past this might have been done in a number of statements, as shown in the following snippet:

VB.NET

Dim p As New Person
With p
    .FirstName = "Bob"
    .LastName = "Jane"
    .Age = 34
End With

C#

Person p = new Person();
p.FirstName = "Bob";
p.LastName = "Jane";
p.Age = 34;

If you have to create a number of objects this can rapidly make your code unreadable, which often leads designers to introduce constructors that take parameters. Doing this will pollute your class design with unnecessary and often ambiguous overloads. Now you can reduce the amount of code you have to write by combining object initialization and population into a single statement:

VB.NET

Dim p As New Person With {.Firstname = "Bob", .LastName = "Jane", .Age = 34}

C#

Person p = new Person {FirstName="Bob", LastName="Jane", Age=34};

You can initialize the object with any of the available constructors, as shown in the following ...