Maybe there’s something obvious that I’m missing or maybe not. Suppose I have a class that is just a representation with getters/setters and no logic. I’m going to use these structures for serialization/deserialization mostly. Suppose I use that object in many, many applications. Suppose I have dozens of these objects. What’s my best approach to sharing these objects?
I understand that I can compile an object into a DLL and reference that DLL. But if I have dozens of these objects, do I compile them all separately so I can use just what I need or do I make and maintain a monster DLL with all of these objects in it. Both of those approaches seem bad. I don’t want to create a class library for every single class (that’s stupid) and throwing them into a giant package just seems like a bad idea.
Am I missing something simple? Doesn’t java have a convention where one can create jar files of one to many classes? Does .Net do something like that?
You need a happy middle ground.
You should be grouping related objects into individual namespaces.
You can then compile each namespace into a seperate DLL. That way, whoever is using the libraries only needs to reference a single DLL per group of functionality.