So I have an abstract base class in a DLL and child classes of that class. I want the childs to be public, but the base to be private so that it cannot be accessed outside of the dll.
How do I do that?
So I have an abstract base class in a DLL and child classes of that class. I want the childs to be public, but the base to be private so that it cannot be accessed outside of the dll.
How do I do that?
You don't and you can't.
If you want to expose the class as public
, the base-type must be public
. One other option is to have a public interface
, and only expose the type via the interface
(presumably with a factory method somewhere for creating instances).
One final option is to encapsulate the base-class rather than inherit it.
Make it public
, make all constructors internal
(if you're using the default constructor, add a parameterless constructor to override that).
Then while public and not sealed, it can't be sub-classed by external code.
Just to clarify what I was saying in comments on @Marc Gravel's answer you could
public ChildClass : ParentClass
{
}
public ParentClass
{
internal void MethodIdontWantToExpose()
{
}
}
That said an interface
is probably the best solution