Question

In a namespace, is it possible to provide an alias for a class? And if not, why not?

By example, if I had several libraries of things that were derived from a contained, but named base class, but wanted to alias that as “BaseClass”, while retaining its actual class name (i.e. “HtmlControl”).

Then consumers could always come along and extend from HtmlControls.BaseClass, without having to figure out which class it really comes from.

Answer 1

There really isn’t an ideal way to do this in C#/.NET. What you can do is have a public BaseClass that inherits from an internal class. You can change this inheritance internally without breaking your consumers as long as the interface to the class remains intact.

public class PublicBaseClass : SomeInternalClass {

}

Consumers inherit from PublicBaseClass, and as long as you are careful, you can change what SomeInternalClass is as you wish.