internal and static

Question

hi I have two class say class A and class B. Now the methods in class B are used only by class A. When I checked class B I found that few methods are static and few methods are internal. Can you sugest me is it fine ? Or since I already have an public instance of Class B in class A so I can remove the static modifier and make it internal. Is there any performance related issues ? Thanks.

Senthilkumar · Answer

Lets discuss about what is internal and static. The internal is access modifier and it can be accessed with in the assemblies. The static is key word which allows to access the methods using the class without instantiating the class. It can only uses the static and can call another static methods. When the object created in the static will be long live objects in the heap memory. It will be resides in the last generation of the garbage collection. When you talk about the performance using inheritance is massive memory usage. Because you know when you have multilevel inheritance then it has to create all the objects (implicit action). It consumes lot of memory. The static is best when you have a single class to call the methods. I feel this case internal is better and i dot think internal and static will have performance issues.

Vulpes · Answer

If the methods in class B are only ever called by class A then you could consider making class B a private nested class of class A. It won't then matter whether you declare class B's methods to be public or internal - they'll still only be accessible within class A. However a private method of class B would still only be accessible within class B itself. If all instances of a class share the same functionality or resources then its better to use static rather than instance methods to expose that functionality. This also has the advantage that the method can be called without the need for an instance reference or for any instances to be created at all! However if there will only ever be one instance of class B created by class A then it doesn't really matter whether B's methods are instance or static. This is purely a matter of OO design - there are no performance implications. Here's a simple example of what I'm talking about here: using System; class A { public void InvokeB() { B.StaticMethod(); B b = new B(); b.InternalMethod(); } private class B { internal static void StaticMethod() { Console.WriteLine(StaticMethod called); } internal void InternalMethod() { Console.WriteLine(InternalMethod called); } } } class Program { static void Main() { A a = new A(); a.InvokeB(); Console.ReadKey(); } }

Jignesh Trivedi · Answer

hi internal is for assembly scope (i.e. only accessible from code in the same .exe or .dll) and instance method of the class. If you project really need then it fine. what is objective behind this? As per suggetion make static class and all methods are static and internal methods are internal static. Static class members can be used to separate data and behavior that is independent of any object identity. The advantage of using a static class is that the compiler can check to make sure that no instance members are added by user. this just suggetion. hope this help.