posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 3:57 PM
by
anoras
Visual Basic 2005 Does Not Support Friend Assemblies
I’ve gotten some feedback from Visual Basic .NET developers having
trouble following my “How To” on code
coverage and IL Merge. I turns out that the Visual Basic .NET 2005 compiler
doesn’t support the InternalsVisibleTo attribute. After adding the attribute to
an assembly, you won’t get any IntelliSense for the internal, or fiend in
Visual Basic lingo, members. When you try to build the solution the compiler
will raise a BC30390 compilation error akin to 'MyClass.Private Function MyMethod(x
As Integer, y As Integer) As Integer' is not accessible in this context because
it is 'Private'. Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this, so Visual
Basic developers either have to spilt their projects into a handcrafted code project
and a generated code project, and live with the housekeeping implications of
having twice as many assemblies to deploy, or live with skewed code coverage
results.