Friendly Assemblies in C#
While looking over Reflector-ed Microsoft code I noticed an attribute called FriendAccessAllowed. I googled a little and I've come up across something called Friendly Assemblies. Basically you want that your code marked as internal be visible to other assemblies that you specify. This way you restrict access for other people, but you don't need to place all your code into a huge assembly.
Microsoft tells us that to do that for .NET you need to use InternalsVisibleToAttribute to make assemblies be friends in either a signed or an unsigned way.
All nice and all, but there is no mention of this FriendAccessAllowedAttribute class. All I could find is a Microsoft patent called Logical Extensions to Intermediate Code, which says extend the runtime's notion of friend assemblies with a "FriendAccessAllowed" attribute, and only include internal methods marked with this attribute in the reference assembly (instead of known implementations in which all internal methods are included in the assembly).. In other words, specify explicitly which of the internal members you want exposed to your friends.
There is another question about this on StackOverflow, which says as much, as well, but nothing actually usable.
As far as I can see, Microsoft uses this in the WPF and Silverlight frameworks only and the funny thing is... the attribute is internal. :)
Microsoft tells us that to do that for .NET you need to use InternalsVisibleToAttribute to make assemblies be friends in either a signed or an unsigned way.
All nice and all, but there is no mention of this FriendAccessAllowedAttribute class. All I could find is a Microsoft patent called Logical Extensions to Intermediate Code, which says extend the runtime's notion of friend assemblies with a "FriendAccessAllowed" attribute, and only include internal methods marked with this attribute in the reference assembly (instead of known implementations in which all internal methods are included in the assembly).. In other words, specify explicitly which of the internal members you want exposed to your friends.
There is another question about this on StackOverflow, which says as much, as well, but nothing actually usable.
As far as I can see, Microsoft uses this in the WPF and Silverlight frameworks only and the funny thing is... the attribute is internal. :)
Comments
Thanks for this nice article, sad and funny. I have been trying to re-write the DatePicker control to be a DateTimePicker control (which is a big absence in WPF) and I found a lot of useful methods marked as internal !!!! I wonder why they want to hide these top secret functionality from us!!! I saw this attribute I thought it might be a key to solve my problem. Apparently it's not. Thanks again.
Mohamed Elashi