Class properties

[1nsp1r3d]

Hi all, While reading this tutorial, I encountered this: class SplashScreen : System.Windows.Forms.Form { ... static SplashScreen ms_frmSplash = null; ... } And I'm a bit worried because of this statement. How can a class have a property of itself? Or the static keyword makes it not act as a class property? Thanks.

[S Senthil Kumar]

ms_frmSplash is a *reference* to a SplashScreen object, not a SplashScreen object itself. If you had a SplashScreen object itself, then it would be a problem, the compiler wouldn't be able to generate the object layout without going into infinite recursion. References are of a fixed size (regardless of the referenced object), so the compiler has no problem with the above code. The static keyword has nothing to do with that. The code that you posted is very similar to something like this in C++

class Node
{
Node *p;
};

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[Colin Angus Mackay]

First, to correct the words that you are using, this is not a property, it is called a field in .NET (although many ex-C++ developers will call it a member variable). 1nsp1r3d wrote: How can a class have a property of itself? A class can have "fields" of any type. Including itself. As to how? Well, the code snipped you gave shows you how. 1nsp1r3d wrote: Or the static keyword makes it not act as a class property? The static keyword makes the "field" available at the class level rather than at the object instance level. A better question would have been "why did they do this?" If you are creating a "singleton" (that is a class that only ever has one instance through the lift of the application) then you need to create a static reference to the one and only instance of the class in the class. If an object is part of a chain of object then it will need to reference another object of the same type. For example, the "decarator pattern" does this. Does this help?

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[1nsp1r3d]

Thanks go to both of you :)