Question

In my application I am running the same winform in different contexts to control visibility of buttons, enabeling of text fields and the winform header text. The way I decided to do this is simply by passing a string to the form constructor and check it with a couple of if statements that in turn contain the desired winform tweaks.

if (formContext == 'add') {     Text = 'Add member'; } if (formContext == 'edit') {     Text = 'Change role';     userTextBox.Enabled = false;     searchButton.Visible = false; } 

This works fine, however the ‘Text’ keywords get a blue squigly line added by ReSharper with the following message: Viritual member call in constructor. Is this a potential problem or just some sort of overly enthusiastic ReSharper message.

Any clarification or suggestions for improvement of my implementation would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

A virtual member call in the base class ctor could cause some logic to run in the subclass before the subclass’ ctor is called (and thus before the object gets a chance to initialize itself to a consistent state).

It’s just a nice reminder so you know you are doing something that could potentially cause some nasty unexpected behavior.