Convinced She’s Write

Disappearing Namespace

November 20th, 2005

Interesting bug for the day: .NET .ASPX referencing a namespace that the project can’t find. First check: did the set of referenced assemblies for the project change? Nope. Second check: did the .ASPX itself change? Nope. Hmmmm…. the namespace just… disappeared.

And Penn and Tina reveal the magic… a namespace doesn’t exist in and of itself. It only exists as classes claim to belong to it. So, when even one class changes its namespace, if it was the only class that laid claim to belonging in that namespace clique, the namespace just disappears.

Makes me think of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan: so long as you believe, it’s still there. And as soon as we stopped believing, the app became non-functional with a set of run-time compilation errors. (Of COURSE that one referenced namespace was by default included everywhere, just in CASE it had some functionality you were going to need.)

Pixie dust… Pixie dust… where’d I store that Pixie dust?

Entry Filed under: Software Development