15. Namespaces, Compilation Units, and Assemblies

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Chapter 15. NAMESPACES, COMPILATION UNITS, AND ASSEMBLIES

You will learn about the following in this chapter:

• How to define and use namespaces

• How namespaces relate to compilation units and assemblies

• The using directive

• How to split compilation units up into smaller compilation units without changing the overall semantics

• Important compiler commands that allow you to

  • Create DLL and EXE assemblies

  • Control the name of a new assembly

  • Include namespaces from other assemblies in your own programs

• The intermediate language disassembling utility called Ildasm

Chapter 4, "A Guided Tour through C#: Part II," introduced you to the idea of using namespaces to organize classes in hierarchies of class containers and thereby keep the classes neatly ordered and easily accessible. So far, you have mainly been exposed to the namespace concept by using a few of the predefined namespaces (System and System.Collections) contained in the .NET Framework. This section looks at how you can define and use your own namespaces and how they relate to source files (also called compilation units) and assemblies.

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