Question

When I add an assembly reference to a project in Visual Studio 8 the Aliases property, of that reference, is set to ‘global’. What is this property good for and why is it set to global?

MSDN tells me that this is a list of aliases for the assembly but not why I might want to use this property or why most are aliased as ‘global’.

MSDN reference

Answer 1

This is for ‘extern aliases’. Suppose you want to use two different types, both of which are called Foo.Bar (i.e. Bar in a namespace of Foo). The two types will be in different assemblies (by definition) – you use the property in VS to associate an alias with each reference, then you can do:

extern alias FirstAlias; extern alias SecondAlias;  using FirstBar = FirstAlias::Foo.Bar; using SecondBar = SecondAlias::Foo.Bar; 

and then use FirstBar and SecondBar in your code.

So basically it’s an extra level of naming – and you shouldn’t use it unless you really, really have to. It will confuse a lot of people. Try to avoid getting into that situation in the first place – but be aware of this solution for those times where you just can’t avoid it.