When any member of the class is declared with the static modifier it is known as a static member. In C#, we can declare fields, methods, properties, constructors, and classes as static. In this article, we will understand the static fields, methods, properties of a class, and then in the next article we will discuss the concept of the static class.
The main advantage of a static member is that it will not be bound with any object. It is individually accessible with the class name without even creating an object.
The static fields are declared the same way as the class fields, you just need to add a static keyword after the access modifier.
public class CustomerInfo
{
// static variable
public static int count;
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Address { get; set; }
}
The static field is created when we try to access them for the first time and are initialized with the default values of their types.
The static field can be initialized as shown below.
public static int count = 0;
As mentioned before, the static variables are shared between all objects of the class and do not belong to any object of the particular class. It means any object can access and modify the static field values and other objects can see the modified values.
Let's suppose, we want to count the number of created objects of the CustomerInfo class, we should use a static field and increment it by one every time the constructor is called.
public class CustomerInfo
{
// static variable
public static int count;
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Address { get; set; }
public CustomerInfo(string name, string address)
{
this.Name = name;
this.Address = address;
CustomerInfo.count++;
}
}
Let's create some objects of the CustomerInfo class and print the count.
Console.WriteLine("Total Customers: {0}", CustomerInfo.count);
CustomerInfo customer1 = new CustomerInfo("John", "11 wall street");
CustomerInfo customer2 = new CustomerInfo("Mark", "22 wall street");
CustomerInfo customer3 = new CustomerInfo("Andy", "13 wall street");
CustomerInfo customer4 = new CustomerInfo("Bruce", "41 wall street");
Console.WriteLine("\nAfter creating a few objects\n");
Console.WriteLine("Total Customers: {0}", CustomerInfo.count);
Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
Total Customers: 0
After creating a few objects
Total Customers: 4
Similarly, we can declare a method as static if we want it to be associated only with the class and not with a particular class object.
public class MathUtility
{
public static int Add(int number1, int number2)
{
return (number1 + number2);
}
}
Like static fields, static methods can be accessed using the class name.
int number1 = 4;
int number2 = 7;
int result = MathUtility.Add(number1, number2);
Console.WriteLine("{0} + {1} = {2}", number1, number2, result);
Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
4 + 7 = 11
All the examples related to the static members are available in the StaticMembers.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understanding.