ReSharper 2021.3 Help

Code Inspection: Member can be made static(shared) (non-private accessibility)

This is a solution-wide code inspection. It only works when the solution-wide analysis is enabled.

Consider the method Print below:

public class Foo { public void Test() { Print("John"); } public void Print(string name) { Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", name); } }
Public Class Foo Public Sub Test() Print("John") End Sub Public Sub Print(name As String) Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", name) End Sub End Class

If solution-wide analysis is enabled, ReSharper suggests that Print has no instance usages and can be made static. But what’s the point? Well, as it turns out, static members yield a small performance benefit under particular circumstances.

Here’s what the MSDN documentation has to say about it:

- Members that do not access instance data or call instance methods can be marked as static (Shared in Visual Basic). After you mark the methods as static, the compiler will emit non-virtual call sites to these members. Emitting nonvirtual call sites will prevent a check at runtime for each call that makes sure that the current object pointer is non-null. This can achieve a measurable performance gain for performance-sensitive code. In some cases, the failure to access the current object instance represents a correctness issue.

For the solution-wide inspection to work, you need to enable at least one of the following:

  • Simplified global usage checking: select Show unused non-private type members when solution-wide analysis is off on the Code Inspection | Settings page of ReSharper options (Alt+R, O).

  • Solution-wide analysis: select Enable solution-wide analysis on the Code Inspection | Settings page of ReSharper options (Alt+R, O).

Note that even if the reported member has no direct usages in your solution, there could be cases where it is used indirectly — for example, via reflection — or it could just be designed as public API. In all those cases you would want to suppress the usage-checking inspection for the member in one of the following ways:

Last modified: 07 April 2022