Can I expose only a portion of one .NET DLL's public classes via a different "API" DLL?

Question

I am designing a WPF application that uses a DLL with maybe 40 public classes. I need these to be public for a variety of reasons including ease of data binding and obfuscation. I would like to allow other people to use only a portion of these classes as an API for my software.

I thought I would create the main library (core.dll) and an API library (coreAPI.dll) with the API DLL to be referenced in a new project. Is there a way to allow coreAPI.dll to expose only a few of the classes that exist in core.dll? It's not so much a security issue as I primarily want to simply hide some of the unwanted classes from the Visual Studio Intellisense.

Again, internal classes for the ones I want to hide is not really an option because I need to data bind some of these classes in WPF and for that, they must be public. Are there any other ways of doing this?

Answer 1

If the primary issue is Intellisense, then moving these classes into a separate namespace would surely do the trick?

Of course, you could split the classes into two separate assemblies. You may have some issues there with having to expose more classes than you want (because they now live in separate assemblies), which might be resolvable using the InternalsVisibleTo attribute

Answer 2

As Damien already mentioned, if the only thing you'd like to do is to hide from Intellisense you can add the following attribute to your hidden classes:

[System.ComponentModel.EditorBrowsable(System.ComponentModel.EditorBrowsableState.Never)]