Basic class naming and visibility questions

Question

I always see people giving me code (I mean code examples for questions on SO and the like) like:

    class MyData{
       ObservableCollection<Color> Colors;
       ObservableCollection<Fruit> Fruits;
       ObservableCollection<Pairs> Pairs;

       public void MatchCurrentSelection(){
            .....
etc
            }
       }
    } 

Everytime I start writing code in visual studio, it forces me to declare the visibility, and always included in a namespace. Do people jsut leave out the namespace as its irrelevant? And why am I always forced to set the visibilty? (It appears to automatically append private by default)

    namespace TheProject
    {
        public class MyData
        {
            private ObservableCollection<Colors> Colors;
            private ObservableCollection<Fruits> Fruits;
...

    etc

I have to be missing something here...What's the story?

Thanks

Answer 1

You should normally get the namespace that is the default of your project when you add a class to your project in VS 2008 SP1. This is what I got 2 minutes ago.

As far as the class is concerned, the default template has no visibility attribute, so it is internal (not private).

I guess the idea is that making it public has consequences, so you should do it explicitly.

Personally, I prefer my classes to be public by default, so I edited the VS template at: c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Code\1033\Class.zip

Inside, the class.cs file is the one to edit. VS has to be restarted for the change to take effect.

Answer 2

If by "giving me code", you mean providing samples/examples on stackoverflow, then visibility and namespacing has probably been ommited for brevity, I know I do!

It's the same reason a large amount of sample code (here, and on places like msdn.microsoft.com) ommit most of the error-checking/handling, because having all that makes it harder to see the intent of the specific bit of code being provided as an example.