All About Statics

The following are notes that I took by reading K. Scott Allen's article:

Get a Charge From Statics with Seven Essential Programming Tips

• An explicit static constructor results in code that performs worse.
• An implicit constructor has an additional metadata flag named beforefieldinit. This flag allows the runtime to execute the type constructor method at any time it chooses, as long as the method executes before the first access to a static field for the type.
• The runtime will stop any exceptions trying to leave a type constructor and wrap the exception inside of a new TypeInitializationException object. The original exception thrown inside the type constructor is then available from the InnerException property of the TypeInitializationException object. The second time you try to access a static property of the type, the runtime does not try to invoke the type constructor again, but throws the same exception observed in the first iteration.
• You should plan to catch any exceptions inside of a type constructor if there is any possibility of recovering from the error, and you should allow an application to terminate if the error cannot be reconciled.
• Avoid touching the static members of another type from within a type constructor.
• The CLR does not support the inheritance of static members. Nevertheless, both the Visual Basic and C# compilers allow you to touch static members of a base type through a derived type name.

Read Scott's article for more detail.