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Reference Name case is not CLS Compliant

Answer 1

+4 A:

Not all .NET languages are case sensitive (VB for example) when you have mixed namespaces like this, diffing only in case (to use the wording of the warning) your code may not be accessable to other developers.

That may not be your case, which is why it's a warning (which in my shop we treat as an error)

Ralph Shillington 2009-06-02 11:08:33

Thanks Ralph, i'm still not understanding why this should matter since my project is not exposing anything form the referenced assembly to any potential VB clients. I'm effectively abstracting the VB client from the underlying assembly?

2009-06-02 11:13:19

Since VB is not case-sensitive, It is not able to differentiate between SampleNamespace.A and Samplenamespace.A and hence it is not able to determine which type to invoke. To prevent such ambiguity the C# Compiler flags this up so that you can only create types and members that can be invoked by everyone without any ambiguity.

Gishu 2009-06-02 11:19:28

I think, It is a blind check-and-flag, it is not considering how you are actually using or exposing the types.

Gishu 2009-06-02 11:20:45

There is no way it can *know* whether the code is accessed from VB. What if someone on another computer next week is going to write an assembly in VB which calls some functions in yours? Anything in your assembly is available to other assemblies. And those other assemblies may be written in any .NET language.

jalf 2009-06-02 11:34:03

Answer 2

A:

It is simply warning you since not all languages that can consume the types within your solution will be aware of the difference (and may be unable to use the types).

I think that you can avoid this warning by marking your assembly as being non-CLS compliant (in the AssemblyInfo.cs file) (read more here):

[assembly:CLSCompliant(false)]

Not sure I think it's a good idea though...

Update: I think that the reason that the warning is issued though nothing is publicly exposed is that namespaces do not have access modifiers. You could perhaps say that namespaces are always public, so they are exposed to potential clients, even though they may not contain any public types.

Fredrik Mörk 2009-06-02 11:10:13

Fredrik, i could make the code none CLS-Compliant but i'd rather not considering the any client code of my app is not exposed to this assembly. It just doesn't seem like a valid situation to break CLS-Compliance.

2009-06-02 11:19:41

I got curious as well and did some tests; see my update in the answer.

Fredrik Mörk 2009-06-02 11:24:02

That makes since Fredrik. I suppose my only options are to either change the namespace or set CLS compliance to false. Thanks for you help

2009-06-02 11:47:13

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Reference Name case is not CLS Compliant

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