Question

Is there a way to only define your parent namespace with out having to define all the children as well?

Answer 1

I assume you are referring to something like the Java language that supports:

imports Java.AWT.*

As far as I know the * in the above statement is a wild-card so you don’t have to define every method in the namespace.

In .net the various libraries are grouped together by namespaces and some of them appear to be subsets but I don’t think they are actually represented as a heirarchy internally.

So for example if you wanted to use the StringBuilder class you would add in:

using System.Text;

but if you then wanted use Regular Expressions you would also add in

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

Visual Studio has pretty good detection of this kind of thing so as long as you typed in a class name that is inside one of the libraries like

Regex reg = new Regex();

then after you had typed the first Regex you would be able to right click on it and choose the Resolve menu to either make it fully qualified like

System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex reg = new Regex();

or add a using statement at the top (as demonstrated above)