Question

I have been refactoring the codebase of the project that I am currently on so that classes/interfaces which are not useful beyond the confines of the assembly should be declared as internal (rather than public). But I’ve run into a problem with the following code:

internal interface IFirstInterface
{
    ...
}

internal interface ISecondInterface
{
    IFirstInterface First{ get; }
    ...
}

public class Implementer : ISecondInterface
{
    public IFirstInterface First {get; private set;}
    ...
}

My questions:

1. Why do members of internal interfaces have to be publicly implemented? If you implement the interface on an internal class, shouldn’t the implemented members be internal? This is not a big issue since the interface members won’t be publicly accessible anyway, given the class is internal. It just seems counter intuitive.

2. The main problem is with the scenario above since I cannot have a public getter for IFirstInterface since it is purportedly an internal interface i.e. I get the following error from the compiler:

Inconsistent accessibility: property
type ‘IFirstInterface’ is less
accessible than property
‘Implementer.First’

Is there any way around this?

Note: I realise that there is probably little value in this refactoring exercise but I thought it would be a good way for me to understand more deeply the implications of the internal modifier.

Answer 1

Just to note – the code you’ve actually provided does compile, because Implementer is an internal class. The problem comes when Implementer is public.

The way round this is to use explicit interface implementation:

public class Implementer : ISecondInferface
{
    private IFirstInterface first;
    IFirstInterface ISecondInterface.First { get { return first; } }
}

You can’t have the setter in there, because you’re explicitly implementing the interface which doesn’t define the setter. You could do this as an alternative:

public class Implementer : ISecondInterface
{
    internal IFirstInterface First { get; private set; }
    IFirstInterface ISecondInterface.First { get { return First; } }
}

It’s unfortunate that internal interfaces have public members – it does complicate things like this. It would be strange for a public interface to have an internal member (what would it be internal to – the implementer or the declarer?) but for internal interfaces it makes a lot more sense.