Writing a web part recently, I was attempting to set some default values for locale sensitive properties. I wanted them set early in the webpart lifecycle so I figured I’d do it in the web part constructor.

Since they are locale sensitive I was using the SPUtility.GeLocalizedString method to fetch the value from resources.

When I tried adding the web part to a page, I’d get a security exception which indicated that “access to the file is denied”. Among other things the exception also contained various security link demand violations.

Thanks to an obscure post I found on a forum somewhere, it turns out that you can’t call the SharePoint object model from the constructor, and moving the offending calls to another location (say OnInit) fixed the problem.