Namespaces


Namespaces are the way that .NET avoids name clashes between classes. They are designed to avoid the situation in which you define a class to represent a customer, name your class Customer, and then someone else does the same thing (a likely scenario - the proportion of businesses that have customers seems to be quite high).

A namespace is no more than a grouping of data types, but it has the effect that the names of all data types within a namespace are automatically prefixed with the name of the namespace. It is also possible to nest namespaces within each other. For example, most of the general-purpose .NET base classes are in a namespace called System. The base class Array is in this namespace, so its full name is System.Array.

.NET requires all types to be defined in a namespace; for example, you could place your Customer class in a namespace called YourCompanyName. This class would have the full name YourCompanyName.Customer.

Tip 

If a namespace is not explicitly supplied, the type will be added to a nameless global namespace.

Microsoft recommends that for most purposes you supply at least two nested namespace names: the first one refers to the name of your company, and the second one refers to the name of the technology or software package that the class is a member of, such as YourCompanyName.SalesServices.Customer. This protects, in most situations, the classes in your application from possible name clashes with classes written by other organizations.

Chapter 2, “C# Basics,” looks more closely at namespaces.




Professional C# 2005 with .NET 3.0
Professional C# 2005 with .NET 3.0
ISBN: 470124725
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 427

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net