Chose your battles

· April 26, 2007

When trying to force something to be what you want you have to know when to give up and when to keep trying a little while longer… that’s my lesson from this week.

Last friday (?) i wrote about namespaces in VB.NET and how to make them appear a the top of the class file automatically. Well i learned a lot about VB since then (actually!) and one of the things are the philosophy of VB.NET. VB.NET comes from a long row of Visual Basic releases, who all are alike in the way that the frees the user from having to care about the stuff behind the scene.

(If you don’t like VB.NET please feel free to exchange the word “frees” to “hides” in the previous sentence :))

Although there are lesser and lesser stuff tucked away there are still some inheritance from that traditions and Default Namespace is one of them. In the VB.NET community it’s considered a good thing since you don’t have to write it.

I would stretch it so far as to say that you have to like it and then use it of totally get rid of it. Here’s your choices

  • Put some namespace in the Default Namespace-textbox of the project. When you create new classes don’t add any namespace (or only the subnamespace for this special class). This is good since you don’t have to write so much
  • Blank the Default Namespace-box and write the complete namespace at the top of every class you create. This is the route our project has taken. It’s a bit more writing but give you all the control. Also it’s probably the non-vb-way i presume but don’t care.

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