What is the use of static variable in C#? When to use it? Why can't I declare the static variable inside method?

A static variable shares the value of it among all instances of the class.

Example without declaring it static:

public class Variable
{
    public int i = 5;
    public void test()
    {
        i = i + 5;
        Console.WriteLine(i);
    }
}


public class Exercise
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Variable var = new Variable();
        var.test();
        Variable var1 = new Variable();
        var1.test();
        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

Explanation: If you look at the above example, I just declare the int variable. When I run this code the output will be 10 and 10. Its simple.

Now let's look at the static variable here; I am declaring the variable as a static.

Example with static variable:

public class Variable
{
    public static int i = 5;
    public void test()
    {
        i = i + 5;
        Console.WriteLine(i);
    }
}


public class Exercise
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Variable var = new Variable();
        var.test();
        Variable var1 = new Variable();
        var1.test();
        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

Now when I run above code, the output will be 10 and 15. So the static variable value is shared among all instances of that class.


C# haven't static variables at all. You can declare static field in the particular type definition via C#. Static field is a state, shared with all instances of particular type. Hence, the scope of the static field is entire type. That's why you can't declare static field within a method - method is a scope itself, and items declared in a method must be inaccessible over the method's border.


static variables are used when only one copy of the variable is required. so if you declare variable inside the method there is no use of such variable it's become local to function only..

example of static is

class myclass
{
    public static int a = 0;
}

Variables declared static are commonly shared across all instances of a class.

Variables declared static are commonly shared across all instances of a class. When you create multiple instances of VariableTest class This variable permanent is shared across all of them. Thus, at any given point of time, there will be only one string value contained in the permanent variable.

Since there is only one copy of the variable available for all instances, the code this.permament will result in compilation errors because it can be recalled that this.variablename refers to the instance variable name. Thus, static variables are to be accessed directly, as indicated in the code.