static classes

Jyoti Gautam

Can we inherit static classes or not?

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Vishal Verma11y ago
Short-No,we cant.Inheritance is Object oriented concept and with static class,we do not deal with object.
Sumit Joshi11y ago
HI Jyoti,

This is actually by design. There seems to be no good reason to inherit a static class. It has public static members that you can always access via the class name itself. The only reasons I have seen for inheriting static stuff have been bad ones, such as saving a couple of characters of typing.

Inheritance in .NET works only on instance base. Static methods are defined on the type level not on the instance level. That is why overriding doesn't work with static methods/properties/events...

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Upendra Pratap Shahi11y ago
Inheritance in .NET works only on instance base. Static methods are defined on the type level not on the instance level. That is why overriding doesn't work with static methods/properties/events...
Static methods are only held once in memory. There is no virtual table etc. that is created for them.
If you invoke an instance method in .NET, you always give it the current instance. This is hidden by the .NET runtime, but it happens. Each instance method has as first argument a pointer (reference) to the object that the method is run on. This doesn't happen with static methods(as they are defined on type level). How should the compiler decide to select the method to invoke?