Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Paul — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:45:08 GMT

It's because M$ Visual Source Safe doesn't have good support for merging patches. It's designed for checkout to block all other attempts to checkout.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Bill — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:00:21 GMT

I've seen partial classes used to separate out static methods sometimes for organization purposes (as it is a better option than regions). One example of this is the Rhino.Commons.Util.With class:

rhino-tools.svn.sourceforge.net/.../With

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Speednet — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:44:43 GMT

I actually found a nice use for partial classes.

On some of my larger objects, I use partial classes to separate static methods from instance methods.

I like doing that a lot better than using Regions, which I really can't stand.

I haven't tried it, but I imagine that for very large classes, separate files could be created for properties, constructor, methods, statics, etc.

Bottom line is that I love having the option. Partial classes were a nice idea.

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re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Muhammad Qasim Pasta — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:22:36 GMT

According to our Coding standards document ... a class/file should not be more than 1500 lines.... so we use partial classes in order to manage our codes;

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Granville Barnett — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:27:03 GMT

@Guy - that actually sounds like a pretty clean solution to that sort of thing, I may have to *borrow* that idea sometime in the future.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Guy Harwood — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:07:14 GMT

I have found partial classes very useful of late. While refactoring some classes I find it a lot easier to put deprecated code in a separate physical file, which allows me to navigate and focus on the good stuff a lot more easily.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Granville Barnett — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:09:13 GMT

@Scott - good point, I had not thought of that. Would if have not been better to derive from that class though you wanted to extend? assuming it was not sealed of course.

I'm still pretty unconvinced that people do use partial classes inline with that 1st point on MSDN. Seems to be pretty much designer exclusive.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Scott Hoggarth — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:06:56 GMT

Recently I was working with an open source framework. There was a class that didn't have a method I wanted, so I added it using partial classes. This might be what MSDN had in mind, working with code that you don't own.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Rick Ratayczak — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:59:17 GMT

I use partial classes when I use xsdgen to generate classes from xml files, I add methods to a partial class for it.

re: Partial classes - they have only one real use, right?

Rob Chartier — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:44:10 GMT

One of the larger places I used partial classes is for extending proxy's generated via wsdl.exe for Web Service's. Much of the time you need to extend the set of properties/methods on these proxy's.

A simple example, is that the old way which wsdl.exe worked is that it would only emit fields, not properties. And you can only databind to properties. So in this case we used to have to extend the partial class with the list of fields needed for binding...