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Asked: 2026-06-06T10:36:42+00:00

I have an internal class A that does a lot of stuff and I

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I have an internal class A that does a lot of stuff and I have a set of other classes B, D, E that inherit from class A. Of course this won’t work as the compiler will complain about a public class not being able to extend an internal one (see this for an explanation).

I don’t want A to be public as I don’t want my users to inherit from it. I want them to only use B, D, E.

I know I can hide the class from Intellisense using [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] but the users can still access it using reflection 🙁

Is there a way I can achieve this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Assuming that A is in the assembly A, and B, D and E are in the assembly BDE, you can declare the InternalsVisibleTo attribute on A to make BDE a friend assembly. Like this, B, D and E will be able to see A.

    Still, you cannot inherit from A, as superclasses cannot have a lower visibility than subclasses. You can solve this by declaring A public while making all of its constructors internal. This way, only code with internal access to A will be able to derive from A.

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