In part 2(a & b) of this series, we talked about methods and looked at ways to view their overloads, or ways to call them.  We also looked at the objects returned from a method call.  In this post, we are going to explore a special kind of method called the constructor.

A constructor is a method whose job is to create the object that you want to work with.  When I created the Ping object

PS C:\scripts\PowerShell> $ping = New-Object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping

the New-Object cmdlet calls the constructor for Ping.

Like other methods, constructors can require parameters and can have multiple overloads. 

Let’s look at System.Net.Mail.MailMessage, which is a object that represents an email message.

The MailMessage constructor contains several overloads.  The first method listed is MailMessage(), which is the default constructor.  This method does not require any arguments and returns an empty MailMessage object.  In PowerShell, we would call this method via New-Object, just like with Ping class.

MailMessage()

PS C:\scripts\PowerShell> $message = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage

The first overload requires two MailAddress objects, the first of which is the “from” address and the second is the “to” address. 

MailMessage(         MailAddress from,         MailAddress to, )

Creating an object in PowerShell from a constructor that requires parameters can be done in two ways.  The first is to use the method call notation.

PS C:\scripts\PowerShell> $message = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage($MailFrom, $MailTo)

The second is to use the ArgumentList parameter.

PS C:\scripts\PowerShell> $message = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage –ArgumentList $MailFrom, $MailTo

If you happen to have MailAddress objects floating around, this might work for you.  A more common scenario would be to use the next overload, which takes two strings.

MailMessage(         String from,         String to, )

This overload requires two strings, one for the “to” and one for the “from” address. 

The final overload for MailMessage is

MailMessage(         String from,         String to,         String subject,         String body, )

This overload allows you to pass in four strings and get back basic MailMessage object that is ready to be sent.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a function, where we could provide a type name and get a listing of all the constructors, right from the command line (not needing to go to the MSDN documentation every time).  Jeffrey Snover has beaten me to the punch and provided a function to find the constructors, appropriately called Get-Constructor.  Add that function to the your toolbox, and exploring the .NET Framework becomes a lot easier.

Next up, we’ll look at static methods.  Static methods are methods that can be called without having to create a instance of an object.

One particular type of static method that we’ll dig in to is the factory method, which is another way to create instances of objects.