C# – Difference OnInit and OnLoad in ASP.NET

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I had an interview a week ago and one of the questions was what the difference was between OnInit and Onload in ASP.NET? I had no clue and I don't find any simple answers on the net so can someone explain shortly and simple what the difference is between both? (What I found was that the difference was somehting in the lifecycle).

Best Answer

OnInit (the Init event) happens after all controls have been initialized, but before ViewState tracking is enabled. It's called bottom-up (the Init events for child controls are called before their parent's Init event).

Init is a good place to add dynamic controls to your page or user control (though it's not a requirement). If you can, then those controls will have their ViewState restored automatically during postbacks (see below). It's a risky place to set control properties, though, because they can be overwritten by incoming ViewState. Init is the right place to set ViewStateUserKey, which can help protect your site from one-click attacks. You would also call RegisterRequiresControlState() from there, if you're using control state.

Right after the Init event, each control enables ViewState tracking, so any changes to a control's properties after that will be reflected in ViewState.

The next events at the page level are InitComplete and PreLoad, neither of which is visible at the control level. During a postback, incoming ViewState is restored into controls between InitComplete and PreLoad.

Then comes the Load event, which happens for both controls and the page. Load is called first at the parent level, and then for any child controls. A master page behaves like a control on a page with regard to event ordering.

This is the style that Microsoft tends to use in their examples.

It appears that the guidance in this area may have changed, as StyleCop now enforces the use of the C# specific aliases.

C# – the difference between const and readonly in C#

Apart from the apparent difference of

having to declare the value at the time of a definition for a const VS readonly values can be computed dynamically but need to be assigned before the constructor exits.. after that it is frozen.
const's are implicitly static. You use a ClassName.ConstantName notation to access them.

There is a subtle difference. Consider a class defined in AssemblyA.

public class Const_V_Readonly
{
  public const int I_CONST_VALUE = 2;
  public readonly int I_RO_VALUE;
  public Const_V_Readonly()
  {
     I_RO_VALUE = 3;
  }
}

AssemblyB references AssemblyA and uses these values in code. When this is compiled:

in the case of the const value, it is like a find-replace. The value 2 is 'baked into' the AssemblyB's IL. This means that if tomorrow I update I_CONST_VALUE to 20, AssemblyB would still have 2 till I recompile it.
in the case of the readonly value, it is like a ref to a memory location. The value is not baked into AssemblyB's IL. This means that if the memory location is updated, AssemblyB gets the new value without recompilation. So if I_RO_VALUE is updated to 30, you only need to build AssemblyA and all clients do not need to be recompiled.

So if you are confident that the value of the constant won't change, use a const.

public const int CM_IN_A_METER = 100;

But if you have a constant that may change (e.g. w.r.t. precision).. or when in doubt, use a readonly.

public readonly float PI = 3.14;

Update: Aku needs to get a mention because he pointed this out first. Also I need to plug where I learned this: Effective C# - Bill Wagner

Best Answer

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