Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

3.4. Understanding Namespaces and Assemblies

Whether you realize it at first, every piece of code in .NET exists inside a .NET type (typically a class). In turn, every type exists inside a namespace. Figure 3-3 shows this arrangement for your own code and the DateTime class. Keep in mind that this is an extreme simplification—the System namespace alone is stocked with several hundred classes. This diagram is designed only to show you the layers of organization.

Figure 3.3. A look at two namespaces

Namespaces can organize all the different types in the class library. Without name- spaces, these types would all be grouped into a single long and ...