Question

Sorry if this is a bit random, but is it good practice to give all fields of a class a value when the class is instanciated? I’m just wondering if its better practice to have a constuctor that takes no parameters and gives all the fields default values, or whether fields that have values should be assigned and others left alone until required?

I hope that makes sense,
Becky

Answer 1

I don’t know if it makes a performance difference or not, but any fields for which you have explicit default values I personally prefer to assign them in the declarations, as so:

Public Class MyClass
    Private pIsDirty As Boolean = False
    Private pDated as Date = Now()
End Class

Keep in mind most “simple” types like boolean, integer, etc. auto-default and don’t NEED to be initialized, but I show that here as example and sometimes for clarity you want it anyway. Additionally since any classes I write are all for internal use (we don’t sell any code objects for public use) I can be assured to the consumer of my classes. So I generally just write a minimal constructor (if a non-default one is needed) that only takes the primary fields, and spin up any additional values with the new With syntax in VB as so:

Dim myObj = New SomeClass() With { .Prop1 = "value", .Prop2 = Now() }