When will the fields in abstract class get initialized

Question

I have an abstract class like

public abstract class BaseController
    {
        private static string stype;
        protected abstract List<int> integers();

        public List<int> Execute()
        {

            return this.integers();

        }

    }
}

And I have two classes inheriting from this basecontroller class.

Both the deriving classes have their methods getting invoked from class by starting threads.

So what i want to understand is that when will the private static field in the above class will be initialized?

THanks

Answer 1

Your question is actually a fair bit more complicated than you probably guessed. But the short version is: the CLR guarantees that all static members of a type will be initialized no later than the first time the member is used (*).

In your example, the static field stype is never assigned, so it will always have its default value of null. The CLR will initialize it to that value before any of your code accesses the field.

(*) The guarantee is actually a bit more strict than this, but IMHO the practical question that most people care about is whether the field can ever be accessed before it's initialized, and the answer to that is "no, not under normal circumstances". Jon Skeet has discussed this in more than one article in the past; here's one of them: C# and beforefieldinit