Question

Recently I was reading about partitioning code with .NET assemblies and stumbled upon a nice suggestion from this post: “reduce the number of your .NET assemblies to the strict minimum”.

I couldn’t agree more! And one of the reasons I personally see most often, is that people just want to isolate some piece of code, so they make the types/methods internal and put them into a separate project.

There are many other reasons (valid and not) for splitting code into several assemblies, but if you want to isolate components/APIs while still having them located in one library, how can you do that?

namespace MyAssembly.SomeApiInternals
{
     //Methods from this class should not 
     //be used outside MyAssembly.SomeApiInternals
     internal class Foo
     {              
          internal void Boo() { }
     }
}

namespace MyAssembly.AnotherPart
{
     public class Program
     {              
          public void Test() 
          {
               var foo = MyAssembly.SomeApiInternals.Foo();
               foo.Boo(); //Ok, not a compiler error but some red flag at least 
          }
     }
}             

How can one restrict a type/method from being used by other types/methods in the same assembly but outside this very namespace?

(I’m going to give a few answers myself and see how people would vote.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could put the code in different assemblies, then merge the assemblies with ILMerge in a post-build step…