Share via

Friend Assemblies

  • Article

You have some types in your assembly A. And you have some assembly B. You really want assembly B to see those types. But you don't want them to open to the world. What do you do?

In v1.0 and v1.1, you will mark those types as public, and then decorate them with StrongNameIdentityPermission.

In Whidbey+, you will say assembly B is assembly A's friend. 

Note the sample in the page is incorrect. The correct syntax is:

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo ("AssemblyB, PublicKeyToken=32ab4ba45e0a69a1")]

The string in InternalsVisibleToAttribute’s constructor is the friend assembly’s name. 

When you declare assembly B as friend of assembly A, assembly B can access assembly A’s non public types. 

What is the difference between StrongNameIdentityPermission and friend assembly?

1. StrongNameIdentityPermission applies to individual type, while friend assembly applies to the whole assembly. 

If there are hundreds of types in assembly A that you want to share with assembly B, you have to decorate all of them with StrongNameIdentityPermission. While using friend assembly, you only need to state it once. 

2. More importantly, with StrongNameIdentityPermission, the types you want to share have to be declared as public. While in friend assembly case, those types can (and should) be non public. 

3. There can be only one StrongNameIdentityPermission on one type. But you can declare as many as assemblies as your friends. 

Friendship in Friend Assemblies is one way only. When assembly A says assembly B is its friend, it does not imply assembly A is assembly B’s friend. You will have to declare the friendship explicitly in assembly B. 

Friendship is not transitive. If assembly C is friend of assembly B, and assembly B is friend of assembly A, assembly C does not automatically becomes friend of assembly A. 

[You know, pre-released material, subject to change disclaimer applies here]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2004
    This is cool! So does this mean we can do XML serialization without exposing our serializable classes as public for everyone to see?
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2004
    I have no idea about how friend assembly works with XML serialization.

    Ans to answer ToddM's question. Myself do not use VS. But I believe they have support for that. You can try it in VS 2005 beta1 now.

    For the performance concern, it should be very minimum, and only occurs when you access non public fields/methods.
  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    friend assemblies change
  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2007
    PingBack from http://blog.aheil.de/WPFAndTheVistaUserExperience.aspx