I have an assembly that contains base objects for my Business Objects, and then another assembly that is automatically generated and populated with classes based off a database schema. The classes in the latter assembly all inherit from a class in the former.
The idea I had was that I could reference the generated assembly from other projects, and ‘not’ the assembly with the base objects thus hiding some of the implementation details and prohibiting people from using these objects.
Unfortunately, I am realizing that I cannot use any of the functionality built into the base unless I reference it as well. So my question is: Is there anyway around this, and if not then is there a design pattern that addresses this that I should be using?
If you really don’t want to expose the base classes to others (think extensibility), then you probably should move the bases into the same assembly as the concretes.
If you still need the assemblies separated, you can still make the bases internal, and then set the InternalVisiblesToAttribute on the base class assembly:
(In AssemblyInfo.cs)