Why is an Add method required for { } initialization?

Question

To use initialization syntax like this:

var contacts = new ContactList
{
    { \"Dan\", \"dan.tao@email.com\" },
    { \"Eric\", \"ceo@google.com\" }
};
<         


        

Answer 1

As far as I understand it, the collection initializer syntax is just syntactic sugar with no special tricks in it. It was designed in part to support initializing collections inside Linq queries:

from a in somewhere
select new {
   Something = a.Something
   Collection = new List