In what namespace should you put interfaces relative to their implementors?

Question

Specifically, when you create an interface/implementor pair, and there is no overriding organizational concern (such as the interface should go in a different assembly ie, as recommended by the s# architecture) do you have a default way of organizing them in your namespace/naming scheme?

This is obviously a more opinion based question but I think some people have thought about this more and we can all benefit from their conclusions.

Answer 1

What I generally do is to create an Interfaces namespace at a high level in my hierarchy and put all interfaces in there (I do not bother to nest other namespaces in there as I would then end up with many namespaces containing only one interface).

Interfaces
|--IAnimal
|--IVegetable
|--IMineral
MineralImplementor
Organisms
|--AnimalImplementor
|--VegetableImplementor

This is just the way that I have done it in the past and I have not had many problems with it, though admittedly it might be confusing to others sitting down with my projects. I am very curious to see what other people do.

Answer 2

I usually keep the interface in the same namespace of as the concrete types.

But, that's just my opinion, and namespace layout is highly subjective.

Animals
|
| - IAnimal
| - Dog
| - Cat
Plants
|
| - IPlant
| - Cactus

You don't really gain anything by moving one or two types out of the main namespace, but you do add the requirement for one extra using statement.

Answer 3

The answer depends on your intentions.

• If you intend the consumer of your namespaces to use the interfaces over the concrete implementations, I would recommend having your interfaces in the top-level namespace with the implementations in a child namespace
• If the consumer is to use both, have them in the same namespace.
• If the interface is for predominantly specialized use, like creating new implementations, consider having them in a child namespace such as Design or ComponentModel.

I'm sure there are other options as well, but as with most namespace issues, it comes down to the use-cases of the project, and the classes and interfaces it contains.

Answer 4

(.Net) I tend to keep interfaces in a separate "common" assembly so I can use that interface in several applications and, more often, in the server components of my apps.

Regarding namespaces, I keep them in BusinessCommon.Interfaces.

I do this to ensure that neither I nor my developers are tempted to reference the implementations directly.

Answer 5

Separate the interfaces in some way (projects in Eclipse, etc) so that it's easy to deploy only the interfaces. This allows you to provide your external API without providing implementations. This allows dependent projects to build with a bare minimum of externals. Obviously this applies more to larger projects, but the concept is good in all cases.

Answer 6

I prefer to keep my interfaces and implementation classes in the same namespace. When possible, I give the implementation classes internal visibility and provide a factory (usually in the form of a static factory method that delegates to a worker class, with an internal method that allows a unit tests in a friend assembly to substitute a different worker that produces stubs). Of course, if the concrete class needs to be public--for instance, if it's an abstract base class, then that's fine; I don't see any reason to put an ABC in its own namespace.

On a side note, I strongly dislike the .NET convention of prefacing interface names with the letter 'I.' The thing the (I)Foo interface models is not an ifoo, it's simply a foo. So why can't I just call it Foo? I then name the implementation classes specifically, for example, AbstractFoo, MemoryOptimizedFoo, SimpleFoo, StubFoo etc.

Answer 7

I usually separate them into two separate assemblies. One of the usual reasons for a interface is to have a series of objects look the same to some subsystem of your software. For example I have all my Reports implementing the IReport Interfaces. IReport is used is not only used in printing but for previewing and selecting individual options for each report. Finally I have a collection of IReport to use in dialog where the user selects which reports (and configuring options) they want to print.

The Reports reside in a separate assembly and the IReport, the Preview engine, print engine, report selections reside in their respective core assembly and/or UI assembly.

If you use the Factory Class to return a list of available reports in the report assembly then updating the software with new report becomes merely a matter of copying the new report assembly over the original. You can even use the Reflection API to just scan the list of assemblies for any Report Factories and build your list of Reports that way.

You can apply this techniques to Files as well. My own software runs a metal cutting machine so we use this idea for the shape and fitting libraries we sell alongside our software.

Again the classes implementing a core interface should reside in a separate assembly so you can update that separately from the rest of the software.