Question

I was surprised to find out that the parameter-less constructor of my base class is called any time I call any constructor in a derived class. I thought that is what : base() was for, to explicitly call the base constructor if and when I want to.

How can I prevent the base constructor from being called when I instantiate a derived class?

using System;

namespace TestConstru22323
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Customer customer = new Customer("Jim", "Smith");
            Customer c = new Customer();
            Console.WriteLine(customer.Display());

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

    public class Person
    {
        public Person()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("I don't always want this constructor to be called. I want to call it explicitly.");
        }
    }

    public class Customer : Person
    {
        private string _firstName;
        private string _lastName;

        //public Customer(string firstName, string lastName): base()  //this explicitly calls base empty constructor
        public Customer(string firstName, string lastName) //but this calls it anyway, why?
        {
            _firstName = firstName;
            _lastName = lastName;
        }

        public string Display()
        {
            return String.Format("{0}, {1}", _lastName, _firstName);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

The only way is to explicitly tell it which other base ctor you want it to call; which of course means you must choose some base ctor to call.

You can’t have it call no base ctor at all – conceptually, constructing a Customer is done by first constructing a Person, and then doing Customer specific construction on top of it. For example, suppose Person had private fields – how would these be correctly constructed if construction of a Customer was allowed to not first construct a Person?