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Asked: 2026-05-11T05:40:25+00:00

Can someone give me 1 good reason why in C# the chained constructor is

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Can someone give me 1 good reason why in C# the chained constructor is always called before any of the constructor body?

.NET allows you to call the chained constructor at any point within the constructor, so why does C# force you to do it before your constructor body executes?

I once wrote to Anders H and asked him this and he was kind enough to spend the time replying despite how busy he must be. Unfortunately he managed to answer a question I didn’t actually ask (about named constructors.)

So, just out of curiosity I thought I would ask here because personally I don’t think there is a single good reason for this limitation, so hopefully I will be reeducated 🙂

Just to clarify. The .NET CLR rule is that 1 constructor must be called, only 1 constructor, and only once. So in the CLR these are valid

public class Meh {   public Meh()   {     Console.WriteLine('Meh()');     this('Hello');   }    public Meh(string message)   {     Console.WriteLine('Meh {0}', message);     base();   } }

But not in C#

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1 Answer

  1. If there were a genuine reason why this ability should not be provided then it wouldn’t be supported by the CLR or other .NET languages. I can only conclude that the answer is one of those ‘Because it’s always been this way’ ones, and the restriction was probably just copied from C++ or something.

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