Shared & Protected methods

Shared methods

You can have as many shared (static, in C#) methods as you want. But the constraint here is that these methods will not be available from the class's instance objects. Also, with shared methods the benefits of object "construction" are not available, since shared methods can only be called on the class directly rather than on the instances. Also, shared methods do not have access to the class's non-shared or non-static member variables.

Protected members are different from friend members...Consider any class "A". Friend methods are those that belong to a different class but have access to A's members. Protected members are those members that can be accessed by a derived class's methods - this is different from private members which can only be accessed by the methods of A. Consider the class "A" mentioned above: Member type Access level Private Can be accessed only by methods of A Protected Can be accessed by methods of A as well as methods of any class derived from A For friend members, first of all, only "Methods" or "Functions" can act as "Friends" of a class and a method belonging class B must be declared as a friend method in class A so that B.FriendMethod() can access member variables of class A.