C# Inheritance: Static vs. Non-Static Field

Question

I have a library base class (Controller) and three sub-classes that inherit from Controller (Sensor, Output, and Enviro

Answer 1

Well, a private member won't be visible to your derived classes. You would need a protected member or property for that. Within the class, you can just refer to it as errorDescriptions or this.errorDescriptions.

I'd be extremely wary of having a static, protected member variable that isn't thread safe and can be mutated by derived classes. That's just asking for trouble.