Handle Conflicting Namespaces with Aliases
Every once in a long while, I have a class name that appears in two different namespaces (there are other kinds of namespace confusions that I can run into but this is most common).
If I use ConfigurationManager, for example, the compiler insists that I either qualify the class name with the namespace (as Configuration.ConfigurationManager) or qualify a bunch of other ConfigurationManager classes with their namespace. I end up with this code:
Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings(...
But taking the namespace onto the class name is just the most obvious way to do this is to tack the whole namespace onto the front of the class name. If I'm only use the class once, that's not a problem ... but if I have to repeatedly type in the namespace-plus-class-name, things get very boring very fast.
If you find yourself in that spot, you can assign your namespace a short alias and use it instead the namespace. Here's what assigning an alias looks like in Visual Basic:
Imports sc = System.Configuration;
And in C#:
Using sc = System.Configuration;
Now, you can use your alias wherever you had to type in the namespace to save yourself some typing. My code could now look like this:
sc.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings(...
I hope that clears things up a bit.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 02/18/2015