Static Constructors in .NET 3.5, still a bad thing?
Recently at the Philly.NET User Group, Kathleen Dollard gave a great presentation on the use of generics and rethinking object orientation. Both topics were very engaging. But the part of the night that I found most intriguing was a conversation, that I had in a Ruby Tuesdays after the presentation, about the useage of static constructors and if they are still a bad thing to use in your code. Many years ago, I had read the articles by K. Scott Allen and Brad Abrams, explaining why the original FxCop rule, “Do not declare explicit static constructors”, existed and the IL command beforefieldinit, that caused the FxCop rule to trigger and cause performance issues. Jon Skeet explained it best in a recent Stack Overflow post. ...