Understanding Constructors (C#)

What is constructor?

Constructor is a special type of function member of a class. It is used to initialize the instance variables of the object.

Person myPerson=new Person();

Here the new operator is used to allocate the memory needed to store the data of the object.

Now suppose this is how we have defined our Person class.

( here we have used Automatic Properties feature of C# 3.0 to declare our properties FirstName and LastName)

Here in our class we haven’t defined a constructor but we are still able to create instance variables of the Person Object using following line of code

The reason it is possible is because we don’t have to explicitly declare constructor for a class, C# automatically provides a default parameterless constructor for that class. The default constructor will initialize any fields of the class to their zero-equivalent values.

We can also write our own constructors, the things to remember are

• They don’t have a return type.
• Their name should be same as the name of the class.
• Should contain a parameter list, which could be left empty.

Now the question is why would we be writing our own constructors?

Well the reason is because constructors can be used to pass initial values for an object’s fields at the time when an object is being instantiated.

For our above Person class

instead of the following code 

we can do the same in single line of code

The constructor would be defined in the following manner

One thing we have to remember is that if we are defining our own Parameterized constructor the default constructor would be eliminated.

We won’t be able to create person class object using default constructor.

i.e. Person p=new Person(); // it won’t compile.

In this case then we need to explicitly write a default constructor.

bye..