C# Readonly Fields: The Truth

I recently seen this surface in some code I’ve been working on. I had to really think about this one to remember what it was. I knew it was similar to the const keyword but didn’t remember the difference. I don’t like being stumped so I looked it up. MSDN had the following to say about readonly:

Note,The readonly keyword is different from the const keyword. A const field can only be initialized at the declaration of the field. A readonly field can be initialized either at the declaration or in a constructor. Therefore, readonly fields can have different values depending on the constructor used. Also, while a const field is a compile-time constant, the readonly field can be used for runtime constants as in the following example:
public static readonly uint l1 = (uint) DateTime.Now.Ticks;

So readonly fields can be variable based on the constructor. Also, readonly is a runtime constant and const is a compile time constant. I am not sure which is faster. That is a topic for another discussion. Below I have pasted an example of readonly in action.

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using System;
 
namespace ReadOnlyExample
{
  class ReadOnlyExample
  {
    public readonly int importantValue;
 
    public ReadOnlyExample(int a, int b)
    {
       importantValue = a * b;
    }
 
    public ReadOnlyExample(int a, int b, int c)
    {
      importantValue = a + b + c;
    }
 
  }
 
  class Program
  {
     static void Main(string[] args)
     {
       ReadOnlyExample example = new ReadOnlyExample(5, 4);
       ReadOnlyExample example2 = new ReadOnlyExample(1, 2, 3);
 
       //example.importantValue = 4; // The compiler will not accept this statement.
 
       Console.WriteLine("Important value is {0}", example.importantValue);
       Console.WriteLine("Important value is {0}", example2.importantValue);
       Console.Read();
    }
  }
}

The output:

Important value is 20
Important value is 6

Important value is variable based on the constructor. I can think of a few instances where this is useful. Hopefully it maybe useful to you one day.

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