When to use Shared methods in .NET

Question

I'm get kind of getting mixed messages about this so I'm hoping someone can clear this up for me.

Should I be using Shared methods/functions in the following situation:

I have a generic class named "Person". This class represents a person in the database.

I have a manager class named "PersonManager". This class contains methods which adds, updates, deletes individual Person objects. A method also exists to lookup Persons from the database.

Should these methods in the manager class be declared as shared methods? Or is it more appropriate to create a new instance of the PersonManager class each time and call the appropriate method on it.

So, if shared:

PersonManager.AddPerson(NewPerson)

versus non-shared:

Dim MyPersonManager as PersonManager
MyPersonManager.AddPerson(NewPerson)

When looking up Persons, the shared version would be:

Dim dt as New DataTable
dt = PersonManager.GetPersons

versus the non-shared version:

Dim dt as New DataTable
Dim MyPersonManager as New PersonManager
dt = MyPersonManager.GetPersons

Answer 1

Since shared methods and members are called static in C# there is already stuff on Stack Overflow...

When to use static classes in C#