Hi - I am working through the example data layer in chap 11 of Prof. VB.NET - Can someone clarify, why does the writer create a namespace when he/she's only got one class in the class library. I thought the idea of creating a namespace gives you the ability to group classes together and then just use something like - imports myclasses
Any comments much appreciated!

You are correct, that's one of the general intents of namespaces. You can wrap a class inside of a namespace so that you can organize classes. With VB.Net an assembly has a root namespace which defines the main namespace that everything lives in. You create classes, and they live within the root namespace. If you were to create a sub class inside of the class you'd be at the third level.

Public Class MyClass
    Public Class SubClass
    End Class
End Class

<rootnamespace>.<class>.<subclass>
MyRootNamespace.MyClass.MySubClass

Namespace MyNamespace
    Public Class MyClass
        Public Class SubClass
        End Class
    End Class
End Namespace

<rootnamespace>.<namespace>.<class>.<subclass>
MyRootNamespace.MyNamespace.MyClass.MySubClass

Peter

I have not read that far into the book, but there are other reasonse for namespaces. For instance, in your data layer, lets say you want to have have a set of classes that perform similar actions. A query object for example. You may want to have namespaces like DataAccess.OracleDA, DataAccess.DB2DA, DataAccess.MsSqlServerDA all haveing a query object that is specific to the data base. This allows you to not have to worry about using the same class name (Query), but for the developer using the data access layer they know that they go to the namespace for the server they are interested in, and the object will always be called Query. Now these Query objects may all inherit from DataAccess's Query object which can not be instantiated, but is the bases for the classes that are in the sub-namespaces.

Just a thought.


John R Lick
[email protected]