Question

I recently asked a question: What Does :: Mean?

Then today, of course I ran into that exact problem. Going off the top of my head I think I was using both the System.Timers and System.Threading namespaces. As far as I can remember they both have a class called Timer. Now that’s irrelevant what I want to know is what’s the difference between the following:

Using myalias = System.Timers;
myalias::Timer myTimer = new myalias::Timer();

and

Using System.Timers;
System.Timers.Timer myTimer = new System.Timers.Timer();

I hope this is clear enough, I just want to know why use :: when you can just type the namespace out is it just to save typing incase you have a lot of nested namespaces?

Answer 1

It’s not about difference, it’s a way of using the types that are in collision.

If you use some type

namepsace My.System.Pro
{
   public class Project{}
}

begin to use some other project that has

namepsace His.System.Pro
{
   public class Project{}
}

Two types Project are in collision, so istead of writing fully qualified name, you assign a alias to yuor, and/or to his namespace. This is just for comfort, for coding style.