Question

Could someone please provide a explanation of Object Initialisers in C# and examples if possible.

So far I understand that they allow you to condense instances of a class, is this correct?

Answer 1

Object initializers was added to C# in version 3, and provide condensed object initialization syntax. They are nothing but syntactic sugar, meaning they allow you to express the same code shorter than before.

Here is an example:

Foo foo = new Foo { Name = "John", Age = 42 };

Which is the equivalent of:

Foo foo = new Foo();
foo.Name = "John";
foo.Age = 42;

Have a look on the official documentation here.

A related feature is collection initializers, which lets you initialize collections easily:

var names = new List<string> { "John", "Michael", "Joe" }

The above code is short hand for constructing a new List, and then adding each element to it. For collection initializers to work for a type, nothing more is required than a public Add method taking the correct type as the parameter.