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 am late in the game... but just my 2 cents...

One use could be to refactor an existing god class in an existing legacy code base to multiple partial classes. It could improve the discoverability of code - if proper naming convention is being followed for the file names containing the partial classes. This could also reduce the source code repository - resolve and merge to an extent.

Ideally, a god class should be broken down into multiple small classes - each having single responsibility. Sometimes it is disruptive to perform medium to large refactorings. In such cases partial classes could provide a temporary relief.