Question

I am designing a WPF application that uses a DLL with maybe 40 public classes. I need these to be public for a variety of reasons including ease of data binding and obfuscation. I would like to allow other people to use only a portion of these classes as an API for my software.

I thought I would create the main library (core.dll) and an API library (coreAPI.dll) with the API DLL to be referenced in a new project. Is there a way to allow coreAPI.dll to expose only a few of the classes that exist in core.dll? It’s not so much a security issue as I primarily want to simply hide some of the unwanted classes from the Visual Studio Intellisense.

Again, internal classes for the ones I want to hide is not really an option because I need to data bind some of these classes in WPF and for that, they must be public. Are there any other ways of doing this?

Answer 1

As Damien already mentioned, if the only thing you’d like to do is to hide from Intellisense you can add the following attribute to your hidden classes:

[System.ComponentModel.EditorBrowsable(System.ComponentModel.EditorBrowsableState.Never)]