#948 – Using Generic Lazy Class to Implement the Singleton Pattern

October 9, 2013 Leave a comment

The singleton pattern is useful in cases when you only want/need a single instance of a type, e.g. to use in creating instances of some other type (an object factory).

We can make use of the Lazy<T> type to implement a singleton that is created as late as possible, i.e. just before it is used.

    public sealed class DogFactory
    {
        // Instance created when first referenced
        private static readonly Lazy<DogFactory> instance =
            new Lazy<DogFactory>(() => new DogFactory());

        // Prevent instantiation
        private DogFactory() { }

        public static DogFactory Instance
        {
            get { return instance.Value; }
        }

        // Actual methods go here, e.g.:
        public Dog CreateDog(string name)
        {
            return new Dog(name);
        }
    }

Notice that we can access other static members of the DogFactory without forcing the instance object to get created. The instance will only be instantiated when we use the Instance property.

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#947 – Specifying Lazy Instantiation Using a Lambda Expression

October 8, 2013 2 Comments

When you are declaring an object that will be lazily instantiated, you pass a delegate instance to the Lazy<T> constructor, where the delegate instance indicates a method to be called that will instantiate the underlying object.

For example, you could do the following:

        private static Lazy<Dog> dog1 = new Lazy<Dog>(CreateDefaultDog);
        private static Dog CreateDefaultDog()
        {
            return new Dog("Lassie");
        }

Very often, however, you’ll want to pass some parameter value to the delegate or just invoke one of the normal constructors for the object, passing one or more parameters to the constructor.  You can do this by just using a lambda expression, as follows:

        private static Lazy<Dog> dog2 = new Lazy<Dog>(() => new Dog("Lassie"));

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#946 – Specifying Whether Lazy Instantiated Object Should Be Thread-Safe

October 7, 2013 4 Comments

You can use the Lazy<T> class to declare an object that will be lazily instantiated–that is, created just before it is used.

In the example below, we indicate that the listOfAllFamousDogs object should only be created (by calling GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs) just before it is referenced.  The GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs method returns an instance of List<Dog>.

private static Lazy<List<Dog>> listOfAllFamousDogs = new Lazy<List<Dog>> (GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs);

In the Lazy<T> constructor, we specify a delegate that will be called to initialize our object.  By default, this results in a thread-safe implementation that lazily instantiates the specified object.

If we do not need thread-safety, we can pass a second parameter to the Lazy<T> constructor, with a value of false.

        // No need for thread safety
        private static Lazy<List<Dog>> listOfAllFamousDogs = new Lazy<List<Dog>> (GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs, false);

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#945 – Lazy Instantiation, an Easier Solution

October 4, 2013 4 Comments

The previous post showed how to implement lazy instantiation in a thread-safe manner, waiting to initialize an object until it is first used.

.NET 4.0 introduced the Lazy<T> class, which makes lazy instantiation much easier.  If you have an object that you want to instantiate as late as possible, you declare it to be of type Lazy<T>, where T is the core type of your object.  You also specify a method to be called to do the actual initialization of the object.

So instead of doing this:

        private static List<Dog> listOfAllFamousDogs = GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs();
        public bool IsFamous
        {
            get { return listOfAllFamousDogs.Contains(this); }
        }

You do this:

        private static Lazy<List<Dog>> listOfAllFamousDogs = new Lazy<List<Dog>> (GenerateBigListOfFamousDogs);
        public bool IsFamous
        {
            get { return listOfAllFamousDogs.Value.Contains(this); }
        }

Note that you also use the Value property of the new Lazy<T> object to get at the underlying object.

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#786 – A Lazier Singleton Pattern

February 22, 2013 2 Comments

Ideally, you’d want the implementation of a singleton to be as “lazy” as possible, i.e.–create the instance as late as possible, just prior to when you need it.  This helps performance, since we only create the object if/when we need it.

In our earlier implementation, the instance of our class gets created whenever any of the static members of our class are accessed.  This might be when we first access the Instance property, but might be earlier, if we had other static members in the class.

Below is a Singleton pattern that is a bit lazier.

    public sealed class DogFactory
    {
        // Prevent instantiation
        private DogFactory() { }

        public static DogFactory Instance
        {
            get { return InstanceContainer.instance; }
        }

        private class InstanceContainer
        {
            // Prevent early instantiation due to beforefieldinit flag
            static InstanceContainer() { }

            internal static readonly DogFactory instance = new DogFactory();
        }
    }

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