Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

Initializing Objects

Most of the time when you create an object, you need to initialize its properties. You generally

wouldn’t create an

Employee object without at least setting its FirstName and LastName prop-

erties. The following code shows how you might initialize an

Employee object:

// Make an Employee named Alice.

Employee alice = new Employee();

alice.FirstName = “Alice”;

alice.LastName = “Archer”;

alice.Street = “100 Ash Ave”;

alice.City = “Bugsville”;

alice.State = “CO”;

alice.Zip = “82010”;

alice.EmployeeId = 1001;

alice.MailStop = “A-1”;

Though this is relatively straightforward, it is a bit tedious. Creating and initializing a bunch

of

Employees would take a lot of repetitive code. Fortunately C# provides alternatives that

make this task a little easier.

In this lesson you learn how to initialize an object’s properties as you create it. You also learn

how to make constructors that make initializing objects easier, and how to make destructors

that clean up after an object.

INITIALIZING OBJECTS

C# provides a simple syntax for initializing an object’s properties as you create it. Create the

object as usual but follow the

new keyword and the class’s name with braces. Inside the braces,

place comma-separated statements that initialize the object’s properties.

For example, the following code creates an

Employee object named Bob. The statements inside

the braces initialize the object’s proper ...