Moskie

I was having a discussion with someone I'm developing a web applcation with about the use of static classes ("shared" in VB). He's pretty adamant about *not* using them; at least he can't think of a particular situation where he'd want to use them. He doesn't like the idea of unnecessary things taking up space in memory when no users are logged in. I think that's unnecessarily stingy, but whatever.

So I got to thinking about it, and I had some questions. For a web application, at what level are static classes loaded? (The options being at application start, at session start, and at request start.) Initially, I assumed it was at application start, which seems like the only situation where the class is actually "static". But, if that's the case, does one have to worry about threading issues when dealing with static classes? For example, if two requests are made at nearly the same time, and they both make use of a particular static function, what happens when the second request makes the call to the funtion before the first call is finished? I really hope this doesn't mean that you have to work with semaphores when writing static classes for web apps.

The more I think about it, the more unsure I am about what the outcome would be! Any thoughts?

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