c# Public Nested Classes or Better Option?

Question

I have a control circuit which has multiple settings and may have any number of sensors attached to it (each with it\'s own set of settings). These sensors may only be used

Answer 1

I like nested classes in cases like this because it shows the relationship. If you do not want users of the outer class to be able to create items of the inner class separately from the outer class, you can always hide the constructors and use factory methods in the outer class to create elements of the inner class. I use this structure a lot.

Answer 2

This structure seems completely reasonable to me. I wasn't aware until today that Microsoft has advised against doing this, but I'm still not aware why they've advised as such.

I've used this structure in a situation where the nested class only exists to support the containing class (i.e. it's part of its implementation), but other classes need to be able to see it in order to interact with the containing class (i.e. it's part of the class's API).

That being said, Eric generally knows what he's talking about, so out of respect for his knowledge and for the time being, I've converted those classes to use namespaces instead.

Currently, I'm not liking the results. I have a class named BasicColumn, which exists only to represent a column in a class called Grid. Previously, that class was always addressed as Grid.BasicColumn, which was great. That's exactly how I want it to be referred to. Now, with the Grid and the BasicColumn both in the Grids namespace, it's just referred to as BasicColumn with a 'using Grids' at the top of the file. There's nothing to indicate its special relationship with Grid, unless I want to type out the entire namespace (which has a few prefixes before Grid I've left out for simplicity).

If anyone can point out an actual reason why using public nested classes is somehow counterproductive or suboptimal, other than the irrelevant fact that Microsoft doesn't intend for them to be used that way, then I'd love to hear it.