Namespaces (C# Programming Guide)

Switch on low bandwidth view

Collapse All

Language Filter

This page is specific to

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008/.NET Framework 3.5

Other versions are also available for the following:

C# Programming Guide

Namespaces (C# Programming Guide)

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

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:

using System;

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:

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 following sections in the C# Language Specification:

9 Namespaces

Concepts

C# Programming Guide

Reference

Namespace Keywords (C# Reference)

using Directive (C# Reference)

:: Operator (C# Reference)

. Operator (C# Reference)