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How to have a class in a namespace that has the same name that is part of another namespace in a .net class library

Answer 1

+4 A:

Yes, it's possible. However, you should avoid it like the plague. It makes everything much more complicated.

Eric Lippert has written a series of blog posts on this very topic recently. Admittedly it's not quite the same issue - he's talking about Foo.Bar.Bar (where Foo.Bar is the namespace, and Bar is the class) but I believe you'll run into many of the same issues. Indeed, I think you may actually end up making them worse than the scenario he's describing. Please don't do it.

Jon Skeet 2010-03-24 20:58:58

I actually went the route that I did to avoid the "double name" issue. Instead of Company.Product.Domain.Domain, i went with the route of separating the class from the namespace. So in the case of creating my second namespace, i wanted the rest of the data to be in the same path as my class so that the flow to the developers that used it would be the same. Also the class structures would live in the same path in the class libraries. I will read these, but the reason i'm doing what i'm doing is to avoid just what you said foo.bar.bar

dwhittenburg 2010-03-24 21:05:34

@dwhittenburg: But why introduce more ambiguity? If you call it `Company.Product.Domain.DomainHelper` or something like that, there'll be no ambiguity at all, and you won't need to fight against the language.

Jon Skeet 2010-03-24 21:39:48

I understand that, it just seems like a work-around rather than being able to structure the library in a logical structure. Also, I try to stay away from "Helper" objects, etc and put the objects in the correct structure with a correct naming convention. And the main thing is why can't .NET differentiate between a class and a namespace?

dwhittenburg 2010-03-25 13:41:14

Answer 2

A:

You can alias your Company.Product.Domain.Data namespace.

So in your Domain class, instead of

using Company.Product.Domain.Data;

try something like

using myData = Company.Product.Domain.Data;
namespace Company.Product
{
  class Domain
  { ...
    myData::Data.method();
  }
}

I'm not positive that intellisense behaves the way you want with this, but it does disambiguate the Domain class vs. Domain namespace.

East of Nowhere 2010-03-24 21:06:22

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How to have a class in a namespace that has the same name that is part of another namespace in a .net class library

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