Is it possible to reference a method in a static class without referencing the class?

Question

Is there a way to declare a static method within a class/namespace hierarchy such that the method can be addressed directly without having the refer to its classname? For example if I have this namespace and class...

namespace UsefulMethods
{
    public static class DataBaseStuff
    {
        public static DataTable GetDataTable(String command, SqlConnection conn)
        {
            dt = new DataTable();
            dostuff...
            return dt;
        }
    }
}

then I write some code that uses this class and I put statement...

using UsefulMethods;

...at the top of my code, I can get a DataTable returned to me by...

DataTable myDataTable = DataBaseStuff.GetDataTable(command, conn);

I thought maybe I could refer to a static class with a using statement as well like...

using UsefulMethods.DataBaseStuff;

...so that I could just refer to the method without the class name like this...

DataTable myDataTable = GetDataTable(command, conn);

...but this doesn't seem to work. The intellisense doesn't find the static class in the using statement, so I guess that just works for namespaces. So, is there some way for me to have my code to know what static class I'm referring to without referencing it every time I call one of the static methods?

Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

With C# 6.0 you can do that with static import

using static UsefulMethods.DataBaseStuff;

Until then you can't. You have to use class name with static method.

See: New Language Features in C# 6

Using static

The feature allows all the accessible static members of a type to be imported, making them available without qualification in subsequent code:

using static System.Console;
using static System.Math;
using static System.DayOfWeek;
class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        WriteLine(Sqrt(3*3 + 4*4)); 
        WriteLine(Friday - Monday); 
    }
}

This is great for when you have a set of functions related to a certain domain that you use all the time. System.Math would be a common example of that. It also lets you directly specify the individual named values of an enum type, like the System.DayOfWeek members above.