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Namespaces (C# Programming Guide)

Visual Studio 2010

Namespaces are heavily used in C# programming in two ways. First, the .NET Framework uses namespaces to organize its many classes, as follows:

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System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

System is a namespace and Console is a class in that namespace. The using keyword can be used so that the complete name is not required, as in the following example:

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using System;

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Console.WriteLine("Hello");
Console.WriteLine("World!");

For more information, see using Directive (C# Reference).

Second, declaring your own namespaces can help you control the scope of class and method names in larger programming projects. Use the namespace keyword to declare a namespace, as in the following example:

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namespace SampleNamespace
{
    class SampleClass
    {
        public void SampleMethod()
        {
            System.Console.WriteLine(
              "SampleMethod inside SampleNamespace");
        }
    }
}

Namespaces Overview

Namespaces have the following properties:

They organize large code projects.
They are delimited by using the . operator.
The using directive obviates the requirement to specify the name of the namespace for every class.
The global namespace is the "root" namespace: global::System will always refer to the .NET Framework namespace System.

Related Sections

See the following topics for more information about namespaces:

C# Language Specification

For more information, see the C# Language Specification. The language specification is the definitive source for C# syntax and usage.

Reference

Namespace Keywords (C# Reference)

using Directive (C# Reference)

:: Operator (C# Reference)

. Operator (C# Reference)

Concepts

C# Programming Guide

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