C# in Depth

Namespace aliases193same syntax is also available for indexers as well as properties. You could make the settermore public than the getter (a protected getter and a public setter, for example)but that’s a pretty rare situation, in the same way that write-only properties are few andfar between compared with read-only properties.NOTETrivia: The only place where “private” is required—Everywhere else in C#, thedefault access modifier in any given situation is the most private one possible.In other words, if something can be declared to be private, then leavingout the access modifiers entirely will default it to being private. This isa nice element of language design, because it’s hard to get it wrong accidentally:if you want something to be more public than it is, you’ll noticewhen you try to use it. If, however, you accidentally make something “toopublic,” then the compiler can’t help you to spot the problem. For this reason,my personal convention is not to use any access modifiers unless Ineed to; that way, the code highlights (by way of an access modifier) whenI’ve explicitly chosen to make something more public than it might be.Specifying the access of a property getter or setter is the one exception tothis rule—if you don’t specify anything, the default is to give the getter/setter the same access as the overall property itself.Note that you can’t declare the property itself to be private and make the getter public—youcan only make a particular getter/setter more private than the property. Also,you can’t specify an access modifier for both the getter and the setter—that would justbe silly, as you could declare the property itself to be whichever is the more public ofthe two modifiers.This aid to encapsulation is long overdue. There’s still nothing in C# 2 to stopother code in the same class from bypassing the property and going directly to whateverfields are backing it, unfortunately. As we’ll see in the next chapter, C# 3 fixes thisin one particular case, but not in general. Maybe in C# 4…We move from a feature you may well want to use fairly regularly to one that youwant to avoid most of the time—it allows your code to be absolutely explicit in termsof which types it’s referring to, but at a significant cost to readability.7.4 Namespace aliasesNamespaces are simply ways of keeping fully qualified names of types distinct even whenthe unqualified names may be the same. An example of this is the unqualified nameButton. There are two classes with that name in the .NET 2.0 Framework: System.Windows.Forms.Button and System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button. Although they’reboth called Button, it’s easy to tell them apart by their namespaces. This mirrors real lifequite closely—you may know several people called Jon, but you’re unlikely to know anyoneelse called Jon Skeet. If you’re talking with friends in a particular context, you maywell be able to just use the name Jon without specifying exactly which one you’re talkingabout—but in other contexts you may need to provide more exact information.The using directive of C# 1 (not to be confused with the using statement that callsDispose automatically) was available in two flavors—one created an alias for aLicensed to Rhona Hadida