Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Add Business Logic to Generated Code

A partial method (like a partial class) represents code you write to be added as a specific method to a given class upon compilation. This enables the author of a partial class to define a method stub and then call that method from other places within the class. If you provide implementation code for the partial method stub, your code is called when the stub would be called (actually the compiler merges your code with the partial class into a single class). If you do not provide a partial method definition, the compiler goes a step further and removes the method from the class along with all calls to it.

The partial method (and partial class) was created to aid in code generation and should generally be avoided ...