Is there a way to automatically call a particular method immediately after all constructors have run?

Question

I want to be able to call a particular method automatically upon construction of a derived object, however I can\'t think how to do it. The following code illustrates. Another a

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's no built-in way to do what you want (it's a fairly-often-requested feature).

One workaround is to implement a factory pattern, where you don't create objects by calling the constructor directly, but instead implement a static method to create them for you. For example:

public class MyClass
{
  public MyClass()
  {
    // Don't call virtual methods here!
  }

  public virtual void Initialize()
  {
    // Do stuff -- but may be overridden by derived classes!
  }
}

then add:

public static MyClass Create()
{
  var result = new MyClass();

  // Safe to call a virtual method here
  result.Initialize();

  // Now you can do any other post-constructor stuff

  return result;
}

and instead of doing

var test = new MyClass();

you can do

var test = MyClass.Create();