Question

What I want to do is write some classes in C# in a new namespace that act as wrapper classes for classes in another namespace. Sometimes a wrapper class is not needed but I still want a corresponding class in the new namespace. And I want an exact copy of the class. Is there a way to define the class in the new namespace by referring to the definition of another class? In other words I want an alias.

To clarify what I mean, if the existing namespace is named “Namespace1” and the new namespace is named “Namespace2”, using code like this in Namespace2:

using Class1 = Namespace1.Class1;

would not work because Namespace2.Class1 would not exist. Class1 would only be aliased “private” to Namespace2 and not “public” to Namespace2. If I could use Namepsace2.Class1 from outside the namespace, and if that would still refer to Namespace1.Class1, then that would be what I want.

I figured there might be a way to accomplish this with attributes or reflection maybe. If there were some pre-processor directives or macros that could copy code that would work too, but obviously C# doesn’t have anything like that.

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to map one class definition to another.

This can be done manually (through lots of boilerplate code) or automatically through a tool like AutoMapper.