Class visible only to shared project?

Question

I want to separate platform-independent logic of my C# program into a shared project. Now I would like to hide repositories, service classes and such from my platform-specific projects. What access modifier can I use? internal doesn't seem to work, as they are compiled into the same executable (I think) and I don't want to go tag all my classes with InternalsVisibleToAttribute .

Is there a way to make classes in my shared project invisible to my platform-specific code?

Answer 1

There's only one place where you need to know the real type you're trying to instance - the platform provider. Everyone else should just use the interfaces that are platform-invariant.

All the platform-specific implementations can then be private or internal for all you care - you just need to ensure the provider has access. Your application will use the platform-specific provider to get the platform-specific instances, while only ever using the platform-invariant interfaces.

As for "being compiled into a single executable", that's not really important. Most likely you care entirely about compile-time checking, and that's still present regardless of how the final executable is packaged. There's some restrictions on reflection in a partial trust environment, but by that point you shouldn't care - you're only in it for the compile checks, not the runtime safety.

Answer 2

No, there is no such feature in C#. If you consider marking every other project with InternalsVisibleToAttribute an option, that would do the trick.

If possible, you could split off those other files (repositories, service files) to another assembly, which is not included in your shared project.