Is an object constructed if an initializer throws?

Question

I was reading This Article over on Jag Reeghal's blog and It seemed to me that what he was suggesting was really not the same thing as using an object initializer. Then I realized that I didn't really know for sure.

When an object is constructed, with object initializers, and one of those intitializers throws (maybe a Null Reference exception)... is the object actually constructed? Is this basically like an exception being thrown in the constructor? Or is the object fully constructed, and then initialized?

Answer 1

An object initilizer statement like var x = new Foo { Property1 = 5}; will be implemented as something like this:

Foo temp = new Foo();
temp.Property1 = 5;
x = temp;

As you can see, the properties in the initiallizer are set after the object is constructed, however the variable isn't set to the fully-initialized object until all the properties are set, so if an exception is thrown, the constructed object is lost even if the exception is caught (the variable will remain null or whatever value it had before).

Answer 2

It is fully constructed first, then initialized. You will however never get a reference to such an object if an exception is thrown, the compiler makes sure that your reference can only ever refer to a properly initialized object. It uses a temporary to guarantee this.

So for example, this code:

var obj = new Model {
   FirstName = reader[0].ToString(),
   LastName = reader[1].ToString(),
   Age = Convert.ToInt32(reader[2].ToString())
};

Is rewritten by the compiler to:

var temp = new Model();
temp.FirstName = reader[0].ToString();
temp.LastName = reader[1].ToString();
temp.Age = Convert.ToInt32(reader[2].ToString())
var obj = temp;