Accessing a static property of a child in a parent method

Question

Say I have the following code:

class Parent
{

    static string MyField = \"ParentField\";

    public virtual string DoSomething()
    {
        return MyField         


        

Answer 1

I don't get why you think you need both "static" and "non-static" environments to call different properties/functions that return the same thing. If you just do this:

class Parent
{
    public virtual string DoSomething()
    {
        return "ParentField";
    }
}

class Child
{
    public override string DoSomething()
    {
         return "ChildField";
    }
}

Then this will work like you want:

Child c = new Child();
Console.WriteLine(c.DoSomething());

And instead of writing this:

Console.WriteLine(Parent.MyField);
Console.WriteLine(Child.MyField);

you just write this:

Console.WriteLine(new Parent().DoSomething());
Console.WriteLine(new Child().DoSomething());

Is there some other constraint on the problem that makes this unacceptable? Is creating new objects of these classes extremely expensive for some reason, for example?