In C# (VS-2010), is there a way to fail a frontend build if a certain library class is used? (When normally it would compile just fine?)

I'm writing a library that has a bunch o开发者_StackOverflowf classes in it which are intended to be used by multiple frontends (some frontends share the same classes). For each frontend, I am keeping a hand edited list of which classes (of a particular namespace) it uses. If the frontend tries to use a class that is not in this list, there will be runtime errors. My goal is to move these errors to compile time.

If any of you are curious, these are 'mapped' nhibernate classes. I'm trying to restrict which frontend can use what so that there is less spin up time, and just for my own sanity. There's going to be hundreds of these things eventually, and it will be really nice if there's a list somewhere that tells me which frontends use what that I'm forced to maintain. I can't seem to get away with making subclasses to be used by each frontend and I can't use any wrapper classes... just take that as a given please!

Ideally, I want visual studio to underline red the offending classes if someone dares to try and use them, with a nice custom error in the errors window. I also want them GONE from the intellisense windows. Is it possible to customize a project to do these things?

I'm also open to using a pre-build program to analyze the code for these sorts of things, although this would not be as nice. Does anyone know of tools that do this?

Thanks

Isaac

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Let's say that you have a set of classes F. You want these classes to be visible only to a certain assembly A. Then you segregate these classes in F into a separate assembly and mark them as internal and set the InternalsVisibleTo on that assembly to true for this certain assembly A.

If you try to use these classes from any assembly A' that is not marked as InternalsVisibleTo from the assembly containing F, then you will get a compile-time error if you try to use any class from F in A'.

I also want them GONE from the intellisense windows. Is it possible to customize a project to do these things?

That happens with the solution I presented above as well. They are internal to the assembly containing F and not visible from any assembly A' not marked as InternalsVisibleTo in the assembly containing F.

However, I generally find that InternalsVisibleTo is a code smell (not always, just often).

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You should club your classes into separate dlls / projects and only provide access to those dlls to front end projects that are 'appropriate' for it. This should be simple if your front-end and the group of classes it may use are logically related.

If not then I would say some thing smells fishy - probably your class design / approach needs a revisit.

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I think you'll want to take a look at the ObsoleteAttribute: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.obsoleteattribute%28v=VS.100%29.aspx

I believe you can set IsError to true and it will issue an error on build time.

(not positive though)

As for the intellisense you can use EditorBrowseableAttribute: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.editorbrowsableattribute.aspx Or at least that is what seems to get decorated when I add a service reference and cannot see the members.