Use the static modifier to declare a static member, which belongs to the type itself rather than to a specific object. The static modifier can be used with fields, methods, properties, operators, events and constructors, but cannot be used with indexers, destructors, or types.

Remarks

• A constant or type declaration is implicitly a static member.
• A static member cannot be referenced through an instance. Instead, it is referenced through the type name. For example, consider the following class:
  public class MyBaseC 
  {
     public struct MyStruct {
        public static int x = 100;
     }
  }

  To refer to the static member x, use the fully qualified name (unless it is accessible from the same scope):

  MyBaseC.MyStruct.x

• While an instance of a class contains a separate copy of all instance fields of the class, there is only one copy of each static field.
• It is not possible to use this to reference static methods or property accessors.

  Note   The static keyword is more limited in use than in C++. To compare with the C++ keyword, see static in the C++ Language Reference.

To demonstrate instance members, consider a class that represents a company employee. Assume that the class contains a method to count employees and a field to store the number of employees. Both the method and the field do not belong to any instance employee. Instead they belong to the company class. Therefore, they should be declared as static members of the class.

For more information on constructors, see 10.10 Instance constructors.

Example

This example reads the name and ID of a new employee, increments the employee counter by one, and displays the information for the new employee as well as the new number of employees. For simplicity, this program reads the current number of employees from the keyboard. In a real application, this information should be read from a file.

// cs_static_keyword.cs
// Static members
using System;
public class Employee 
{
   public string id;
   public string name;

   public Employee () 
   {
   }

   public Employee (string name, string id) 
   {
      this.name = name;
      this.id = id;
   } 

   public static int employeeCounter;

   public static int AddEmployee() 
   {
      return ++employeeCounter;
   }
}

class MainClass: Employee 
{
   public static void Main() 
   {
      Console.Write("Enter the employee's name: ");
      string name = Console.ReadLine();
      Console.Write("Enter the employee's ID: ");      
      string id = Console.ReadLine();
      // Create the employee object:
      Employee e = new Employee (name, id);
      Console.Write("Enter the current number of employees: ");
      string n = Console.ReadLine();
      Employee.employeeCounter = Int32.Parse(n);
      Employee.AddEmployee();
      // Display the new information:
      Console.WriteLine("Name: {0}", e.name);
      Console.WriteLine("ID:   {0}", e.id);
      Console.WriteLine("New Number of Employees: {0}",
                         Employee.employeeCounter);
   }
}

Input

Tara Strahan
AF643G
15

Sample Output

Enter the employee's name: Tara Strahan
Enter the employee's ID: AF643G
Enter the current number of employees: 15
Name: Tara Strahan
ID:   AF643G
New Number of Employees: 16

See Also

C# Keywords | Modifiers