Can constructors be async?

Question

I have a project where I\'m trying to populate some data in a constructor:

public class ViewModel
{
    public ObservableCollection Data { get;          


        

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with the async keyword (is this specific to Silverlight or a new feature in the beta version of Visual Studio?), but I think I can give you an idea of why you can't do this.

If I do:

var o = new MyObject();
MessageBox(o.SomeProperty.ToString());

o may not be done initializing before the next line of code runs. An instantiation of your object cannot be assigned until your constructor is completed, and making the constructor asynchronous wouldn't change that so what would be the point? However, you could call an asynchronous method from your constructor and then your constructor could complete and you would get your instantiation while the async method is still doing whatever it needs to do to setup your object.