Before deploying my project, I would like to set all public methods to internal methods. Does someone know a built-in function in Visual Studio or an external tool to do such tasks?
With some trivial refactoring, ILMerge can work here. ILMerge can merge multiple assemblies into one, and change the accessibility of everything that is not part of the primary assembly to internal. By separating your current project into two projects (a library containing all the code, and a helper executable that does nothing but forward to the real code in the library), you can, after a build, merge them back into a single file, in which all the library bits are no longer public.
If you have properties/methods public for test reasons you should have a look at Brad Wilsons blog: Testable Object Pattern
This way you don't have to switch, everything stays internal in development.
Or have a look at Jon Skeets suggestion on InternalsVisibleTo
I can only think of two reasons you would want to do this:
Security. In this case you have the wrong idea: access modifiers are not a security mechanism. They are a design concern, describing how an API presents itself. Any debugger will still give access to all your methods, regardless of their access modifiers.
You have another assembly that you use during development that should have full access. In this case you can leave everything internal and make it a friend assembly.
Related
In C#, is it possible to restrict who can call a method at compile time?
I've looked into directives, but that didn't work since I can't assign values to symbols.
#define WHO VisualStudioUser.Current // does not work
I also looked into Code Access Security (CAS) but that's runtime enforcement, not compile time.
The requirement is to restrict access to a method at compile time for specific developers given the method exists in a pre-compiled assembly.
here's more details...
I'm building a framework or a series or assemblies for a team of developers. Because of our software license restrictions, I can only allow a few developers to write code to make a call to some restricted methods. The developers will not have access to the source code of the framework but they'll have access to the compiled framework assemblies.
The quick answer will be: No this isn't possible, and if you need to do it, you're Doing It Wrong.
How would this even work? Does it depend who who's running the code or who wrote it?
Edit There's kind of a way using InternalsVisibleTo and restricting accessing in source control to the assemblies that InternalsVisibleTo is specified for. See Jordão's answer
The requirement is to restrict access to a method at compile time for specific developers given the method exists in a pre-compiled assembly.
One way is to mark the method private or internal, it won't be callable by anyone outside the assembly. UPDATE: Also take a look at the InternalsVisibleTo attribute, which is used to define which assemblies can "see" internals of your assembly.
Another way is to divide the code you want to distribute from the code you don't want people to call into separate assemblies. Maybe you just share an assembly mostly of interfaces with your users, that they them compile against; and you have a separate assembly with implementations that they shouldn't reference directly. Your internal team would have access to the implementation assembly. This is just a common form of dependency management, the dependency inversion principle.
Draft:
Compile the restricted code into (obfuscated) DLLs: TypeA.dll, TypeB.dll etc.
Define an interface for each type, and compile them into separate DLLs: ITypeA.dll, ITypeB.dll etc.
Create a "guard assembly", and embed all restricted assemblies into it: Guard.dll. This has a ResolveEventHandler, and methods to instantiate different types defined in the embedded restricted DLLs. Instances are returned through their interface.
Developers get the interface DLLs and the Guard.dll. Each developer can get a Guard.dll with special authentication tokens in it. For example, a Guard.dll can be bound to PC, an IP address, a GUID issued to the developer, anything.
The developer can instantiate those types for which she has the proper authentication code, and uses the object instance through an interface.
Sorry this is a bit fuzzy, because it was more than a year ago when I used these techniques. I hope the main idea is clear.
Can you try using Extensible C# developed by ResolveCorp, some of the links for study and implementation are:
http://zef.me/782/extensible-c
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/DbCwithXCSharp.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/nunitaddin/archive/2003/02/14/2412.aspx
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/11579/0/page/5
In my .NET solution, I have two projects: one main project and a project for running tests against the main project. In my project, I have several methods that I'd like to keep "private", but would also like to run tests for. Is there an access method that could limit these functions to just inside of my solution?
You are looking for the InternalsVisibleTo attribute.
This attributes lets you specify other assemblies that should have access to types and methods that are internal to your assembly. So, in your main project AssemblyInfo.cs file (or any other source file), you can specify that your test project is a 'friend assembly' and should have access to the internals of your main project:
[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MainProject.Tests")]
On a side note, as pointed out by Alexei, if your MainProject is signed with a strong name key, any 'friend' assembly must also be signed. This is explained here
Although, as mentioned in another comment. Best practice is to test your assembly by using its public API.
You can use InternalsVisibleTo attribute to make internal types and methods visible to selected assemblies.
However, you should try to design your API so that it can be tested using only the public interface.
You should seriously think back about the architecture of your solution. This is a smell that often shows that your class does too much things at once.
A simple fix is to extract this responsibility (those private methods) to another class where they then become public and are testable out of the box...
No, there is no way to limit access to "just solution".
The reason is solution is simply group of projects. One project can be in any number of solutions. So even if you "limit" access to projects included in one solution you/someone else can create another solution that somehow will need to magically get access to methods.
Additionally built assembly does not include any information on what solution it was part of - so there is no information at run time to check access.
To you particular problem - InternalsVisibleTo (as shown in other answers) will give access to internal methods to projects you allow (requires strongly signed assemblies) or refactor your code to avoid need for testing private methods.
I have two class libraries "MyLibrary.dll" and "MyLibraryEditor.dll" for a Unity runtime and editor extension. There are several class members inside "MyLibrary.dll" that are only intended for use by "MyLibraryEditor.dll".
My first thought was to use the internal keyword because I mistakenly thought that this constrained visibility to a namespace. Instead it is clear that this keyword limits visibility to the assembly.
What is the best way to constrain access to some class members to "MyLibrary.dll" and "MyLibraryEditor.dll" without hurting performance? Also, reflection is not an option.
I am happy to simply not document the functions, but unfortunately Intellisense (and MonoDevelop's equivalent) show these members.
If you want internals in one assembly to be visible from another assembly, you can use the InternalsVisibleTo attribute on the assembly containing the internals. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.compilerservices.internalsvisibletoattribute.aspx:
[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("MyLibraryEditor")]
That answered, you might want to rethink your architectural design so that you don't need to use it, since it will open up all internals to the other assembly, not only the ones that you want.
You could make the members internal but use [InternalsVisibleTo] to give access to those members to the other assembly. They'd still be visible within the same assembly as well, of course... there's no way of getting round that.
I primarily use InternalsVisibleToAttribute for giving access to internal members to test classes, and would try to avoid doing this for non-test purposes - but sometimes it can be useful.
This is not possible using pure C# concepts. You are two seperate assemblies, that is as far seperate as you can get, and there is no relationship between the two as far as .Net is concerned.
you could do some things with signing or validation to make it so it would be difficult to use one assembly without the other, but not something you can do to prevent visibility of the classes/members.
I'm writing a library that has a bunch of 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
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).
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.
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.
I am refactoring a large and complicated code base in .NET that makes heavy use of P/Invoke to Win32 APIs. The structure of the project is not the greatest and I am finding DllImport statements all over the place, very often duplicated for the same function, and also declared in a variety of ways:
The import directives and methods are sometimes declared as public, sometimes private, sometimes as static and sometimes as instance methods. My worry is that refactoring may have unintended consequences but this might be unavoidable.
Are there documented best practices I can follow that can help me out?
My instict is to organize a static/shared Win32 P/Invoke API class that lists all of these methods and associated constants in one file... EDIT There are over 70 imports to the user32 DLL.
(The code base is made up of over 20 projects with a lot of windows message passing and cross-thread calls. It's also a VB.NET project upgraded from VB6 if that makes a difference.)
You might consider the way it was done in the .NET framework. It invariably declares a static class (Module in VB.NET) named NativeMethods that contains the P/Invoke declarations. You could be more organized than the Microsoft programmers, there are many duplicate declarations. Different teams working on different parts of the framework.
However, if you want to share this among all projects you have to declare these declarations Public instead of Friend. Which isn't great, it ought to be an implementation detail. I think you can solve that by re-using the source code file in every project that needs it. Normally taboo but okay in this case, I think.
I personally declare them as needed in the source code file that needs them, making them Private. That also really helps when lying about the argument types, especially for SendMessage.
Organize them into a [Safe|Unsafe]NativeMethods class. Mark the class as internal static. If you need to expose them to your own assemblies, you can use InternalsVisibleTo - though it'd be more appropriate if you could group related ones into each assembly.
Each method should be static - I honestly wasn't aware you could even mark instance methods with DllImport.
As a first step - I'd probably move everything to a Core assembly (if you have one), or create a Product.Native assembly. Then you can find dupes and overlaps easily, and look for managed equivalents. If your p/invokes are a mess, I don't suspect you have much in the way of layering in the other assemblies that will guide your grouping.
Why not create a singular file called Win32.vb and within that logically group the pinvokes into separate namespaces, for instance a GDI namespace could use all GDI pinvokes, User32 namespace could use all pinvokes that resides in the User32 kernel, and so on....it may be painful at first, but at least you will have a centralized namespaces all contained within that file? Have a look here to see what I mean...What do you think?
Are your P/Invoke calls an artifact of the migration from VB6? I have migrated 300,000 lines of code from VB6 to C# (Windows.Forms and System.EnterpriseServices), and eliminated all but a handful of P/Invokes calls--there is nearly always a managed equivalent. If you are refactoring, you may want to consider doing something similar. The resulting code should be fair easier to maintain.
The recommended way is to have a NativeMethods class per assembly with all the DllImported methods in it, with internal visibility. In this manner you know always where your imported function are and avoid duplicate declarations.
What I typically try to do in this case is to do what you are talking about, create various classes, static or not, that provide the functionality, this way it can be re-used as needed. Depending on the nature of the calls, I'd shy way from a static class implementation, but that will depend on your specific implementation.
Expansion on Above as requested.
Given the nature of P/Invoke, especially if a number of calls are needed and are of varying areas of implementation I find it better to group like items together, this way you are not pulling in a lot of other clutter, or other DLL imports when not needed.
THe desire to stay away from static methods, is due to calls to unmanaged resources and potential for memory leaks etc..