Question

Which is more conventional in C#?

class Foo
{
  private string _first;
  private string _second;

  public Foo(string first)
  {
    _first = first;
    _second = string.Empty;
  }
}

or

class Foo
{
  private string _first;
  private string _second = string.Empty;

  public Foo(string first)
  {
    _first = first;
  }
}

Answer 1

Don’t know about convention, but the safer way is initializing members as in your second example. You may have multiple constructors and forget to do the init in one of them.