I'm having trouble implementing an abstract class in C#, and I can't figure out how to search for the right answer. I think my question boils down to: "Does the abstract class have to be part of the same assembly as derived classes?"

I have an abstract class and a derived class, and when I put them in the same assembly together, everything works great, so I know all of the basic syntax is correct. However, when I put the abstract class in a different assembly, my derived class goes crazy. For each method in the derived class, I get two errors - the first saying I have failed to implement an inherited abstract member, and the second on my override method saying it can't find an appropriate method to override.

It is clearly finding the right abstract class, since it's throwing errors for everything I am supposed to implement, but somehow it is not matching up the abstract members to my derived methods anymore. How can I make this work?

Thanks,
Julie

After a little more research, I've found the problem is only actually with methods I've declared as protected internal, which starts to make more sense for cross-assembly code breaking.

Now I'm not sure how to accomplish my goal - I was hoping to create an abstract class that represents my company's general coding standards, with some parts precoded and some marked as abstract for each class to implement. In this way, I'd be providing the class as a "contract" that each derived class must implement, but some standard code portions would already be provided. However, I'd really like some of the methods to have internal scope, and that's where things fall apart. Ideas?