As I found out today, the static constructor CAN be called directly:
from another Stackoverflow post
The other answers are excellent, but if you need to force a class
constructor to run without having a reference to the type (ie.
reflection), you can use:Type type = ...; System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeHelpers.RunClassConstructor(type.TypeHandle);
I had to add this code to my application to work around a possible bug in the .net 4.0 CLR.