Understanding the Challenge of Inherited Members

When working with libraries of classes in C# that inherit from common base classes, you may encounter the issue of inherited members cluttering your derived classes. In particular, if you’re developing WPF or Silverlight controls, these inherited members may become vestigial and confusing, especially when viewed with IntelliSense or in visual designers.

The Usability Issue

Imagine you have a series of descendant classes that inherit dependency properties which are no longer relevant to their intended usage. This can not only complicate code readability but also lead to mistakes during development. It’s clear you want to focus on what matters without the noise of unused inherited properties.

The Limitations of Hiding Members

You might be familiar with techniques such as implementing ICustomTypeDescriptor or ICustomPropertyProvider. However, these solutions do not function in Silverlight, which limits your options. Additionally, you can’t simply use the new operator for member hiding if the members come from ancestors that you do not control—an unfortunate restriction that many developers face.

Effective Solution: Overriding and Marking as Obsolete

Step 1: Override the Unwanted Methods

One way to clean up your code and prevent confusion is to override the inherited members you wish to hide. This can be done with the following approach:

[Obsolete("These are not supported in this class.", true)]
public override void dontcallmeanymore()
{
}

Step 2: Utilize the Obsolete Attribute

By using the Obsolete attribute, you can issue a warning or error when someone attempts to call these overridden methods:

• Setting the second parameter of the Obsolete attribute to true will generate a compiler error when trying to invoke the method.
• If set to false, it will generate only a compiler warning instead.

This approach serves a dual purpose:

1. It effectively hides the inherited member by overriding it.
2. It informs developers that these methods should not be used in this context, thus addressing the usability issues head-on.

Final Thoughts

Dealing with inherited members in C# WPF/Silverlight applications doesn’t have to be a tedious process. By taking advantage of method overriding combined with the Obsolete attribute, you can declutter your IntelliSense experience and improve the usability of your classes within the visual designer.

This solution not only makes your codebase cleaner but also provides guidance to other developers using your classes, ensuring they don’t mistakenly utilize deprecated functionality.

With these strategies, you’ll have better control over how your inherited classes present themselves, making your development experience smoother and more intuitive.