Introduction
Namespaces are basic building block of .NET Framework based programming.
Namespace helps the programmer to define the class and class has a big list of
properties, events and methods. The picture given below will outline some
concepts.
As we all know, there are over 13,000 classes included in the .NET Framework
2.0. This is really very big list of number. Think if Microsoft bundled all the
classes together, then we have to loss our lots of time to find any event,
properties or else. So, Microsoft divided the .NET Framework into Assemblies,
Classes and Namespaces. Before we can use a class in a page, we must indicate
the namespace associated with the class. There are multiple ways of doing this.
- We can fully qualify a class name with
its namespace. For example, because the File class is contained in the
System.IO namespace, we can use the following statement to check whether a
file exists:
System.IO.File.Exists("introduction.txt")
Specifying a namespace each and every time is
very difficult and also it involves a lot of typing work. So we can use the
following one.
- We can add an <%@ Import %> directive to
a page to import a particular namespace. System.Net.Mail namespace we use
for mailing and SmtpClient is part of this namespace.
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Net.Mail" %>
- Above one is very cool technique and used in maximum application but if we have to use System.Net.Mail Namespace many-times in same application then we can use that namespace inside the configuration file as given below. We can add a web configuration file to our application by selecting Website, Add New Item and selecting Web Configuration File. We can add multiple Configuration file folder wise for separate purpose. If we add namespace in root Configuration file then it will affect entire web project.
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