Singleton Design Pattern and Inheritance

Implementing the singleton pattern when you are using a single class is trivial using C#. The following chunk of code will accomplish that in a thread-safe manner.

class MySingleton
{
    private static MySingleton instance = new MySingleton();
    public static MySingleton Instance { get { return instance; } }
}

What happens though when you want to use singletons with inheritance (ie: each subclass needs to be a singleton as well)? This was the best I could come up with.

using System;
using System.Reflection;

abstract class MySingleton
{
  private static MySingleton instance = null;
  private static readonly object padlock = new object();

  public static MySingleton GetInstance()
  {
    lock (padlock)
    {
	    if (instance == null)
		    SetInstance(typeof(ChildSingleton));

	    return instance;
    }
  }

  public static void SetInstance(MySingleton instance)
  {
    lock (padlock)
    {
	    MySingleton.instance = instance;
    }
  }

  public static void SetInstance(Type type)
  {
    if (type.IsSubclassOf(typeof(MySingleton)))
    {
	    MethodInfo register = type.GetMethod("Register", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static);
	    if (register == null)
		    throw new InvalidOperationException("Instance must have a static Register method.");

	    register.Invoke(null, null);
    }
  }

  public virtual string Info { get { return this.GetType().FullName; } }
}

class ChildSingleton : MySingleton
{
  private static ChildSingleton instance = new ChildSingleton();

  private ChildSingleton()
  {
  }

  public static void Register()
  {
    MySingleton.SetInstance(instance);
  }
}

class OtherSingleton : MySingleton
{
  private static OtherSingleton instance = new OtherSingleton();
  private OtherSingleton()
  {
  }

  public static void Register()
  {
    MySingleton.SetInstance(instance);
  }
}

class EntryPoint
{
  public static void Main(string[] args)
  {
    MySingleton singleton = MySingleton.GetInstance();
    Console.WriteLine(singleton.Info);

    MySingleton.SetInstance(typeof(OtherSingleton));
    singleton = MySingleton.GetInstance();
    Console.WriteLine(singleton.Info);
  }
}

I’m using this pattern for a project that I have going where resource items can be stored in either a database or on the filesystem. While developing, I would prefer to not have to go through the hoops of updating the database everytime I make a small change to a resource item.

So, while developing, I would use the SetInstance method to initialize the singleton instance to a Type that can read from the file system. Once Im done, I change it back to initialize the singleton instance that can read from the database.

The only thing that kind of bugs me about this is the dependency of the Register method on the derived singletons, but I dont see any other way to do this. Is there a better way? I’d be glad to hear peoples thoughts on this.