The Singleton design pattern stands as one of the most commonly used creation patterns in software development. It guarantees that a class exists in only one instance and grants a universal way to reach that instance. This proves especially handy when aiming to establish a singular hub of control or coordination within your application. Let's explore the Singleton pattern through a practical C# example.
What is Singleton Pattern?
We need to use the Singleton Design Pattern in C# when we need to ensure that only one instance of a particular class is going to be created and then provide simple global access to that instance for the entire application. This pattern becomes invaluable when handling resources like database connections, thread pools, configuration settings, and more—minus the complication of creating numerous instances.
Implementation Guidelines of Singleton Design Pattern
Following are the guidelines to implement the Singleton Design Pattern
- Declare a constructor that should be private and parameterless. This is required to restrict the class to be instantiated from outside the class.
- The class should be declared as sealed which will ensure that it cannot be inherited.
- We need to create a private static variable that is going to hold a reference to the singleton instance of the class.
- We also need to create a public static property/method which will return the singleton instance of the class.
Implement the Singleton Pattern in C#
There are many ways, we can implement the Singleton Design Pattern in C#. They are as follows.
- No Thread-Safe Singleton Design Pattern
- Thread-Safety Singleton Implementation using Lock.
- Implementing Thread-Safety Singleton Design Pattern using Double-Check Locking.
- Using Eager Loading to Implement Thread-Safety Singleton Design Pattern.
- Using Lazy<T> Generic Class to Implement Lazy Loading in Singleton Design Pattern.