During a design session a few folks in my team had questions on using a static class vs a class with static methods.  We hit upon this when designing utility classes and extension methods.During the course of this discussion some of us were surprised about what I felt was basic knowledge and I was also caught out on a few which led me to documenting this down below.

Static Class

  • Marking a class as static means that a compile time check will be conducted to ensure that all members of the class are static.
  • Since the CLR does not have a notion of static, marking a class as static translates it to an abstract sealed class. ( conversly you cannot mark a static class as abstract)
  • Static classes always inhert from Object and you cannot have it derive from another class.
  • You cannot inherit from a static class.
  • Static classes cannot implement an interface.
  • You cannot obviously instantiate a static class.
  • It cannot have constructors and the compiler also does not create a default parameterless constructor.
  • Defining extensions in C# requires us to implement the static extension methods in a static class.
  • There is a minor performance gain to using static methods as documented in this code analysis performance tip.
  • The performance gain is due to the fact that instance methods always use the this instance pointer as the first parameter which is a small overhead.
  • Instance methods also implement the callvirt instruction in IL which also leads to a very small overhead.

Non Static Class

  • A non-static class can have static members. ( both methods and fields ).
  • You can create an instance of a Non static class with static methods.
  • Factory pattern is an example of a Non Static class implementing a static method to control object instatiation.

Microsoft docs has an article on this topic  here .