Question

During a code review I presented a method quickly to the team that I had made static and one person agreed that there was no reason for it to not be static and a person disagreed saying that he would not make it static because it wasn’t necessary and just to be on the safe side for future modifications and testing.

So I did quite a bit of research and obviously it’s a specialized case but I would like to know what you would do in this situation and why?

(Its basically a helper method I call from a few different methods, a very low traffic page. More for my knowledge and learning on Static.)

private IEnumerable<Category> GetCategoryByID(int id, Context context)
{
    var categoryQuery = from selectAllProc in context.SelectAll_sp()
                        where selectAllProc.CategoryID == id
                        select selectAllProc;
    return categoryQuery;
}

Answer 1

Making private methods static is a form of micro-optimization; the method call is slightly faster. But the difference is almost too small to be meaningful.

Generally speaking, you should mark a method static when it:

1. Doesn’t interact in any way with instance members, and
2. You would like to have the ability to call it without instantiating the class, as in Class.Method()

Ordinarily, methods like your example would go into their own static helper class, if they are used in more than one place.