Partial Classes in C#

Question

Are there are good uses of Partial Classes outside the webforms/winforms generated code scenarios? Or is this feature basically to support that?

Answer 1

I worked on a project a couple years ago where we had a typed DataSet class that had a ton of code in it: Methods in the DataTables, methods in the TableAdapters, declarations of TableAdapter instances, you name it. It was a massive central point of the project that everyone had to work on often, and there was a lot of source-control contention over the partial class code file.

So I split the code file into fix or six partial class files, grouped by function, so that we could work on smaller pieces and not have to lock the whole file every time we had to change some little thing.

(Of course, we could also have solved the problem by not using an exclusively-locking source-control system, but that's another issue.)