Good Namespace Naming Conventions

Question

I am creating a class library for a CRUD business application. The major \"categories\" of business objects (with related data access layer objects) are:

• Maint

Answer 1

Your namespace hierarchy looks similar to a condition called nested generalization. This is when you have classes which derive multiple different ways.

Imagine a class hierarchy as follows:

class Vehicle 

class Car : Vehicle
class CarRed : Car 
class CarBlue : Car 

class Truck : Vehicle 
class TruckRed : Truck 
class TruckBlue : Truck

Note that vehicles can be either cars or trucks. Also, vehicles can be either red or blue. This works perfectly well, but there is a problem when you want to add a new color, or vehicle type, because the burden of modification grows quadratically.

This problem is described by the GOF design patterns book -- Specifically the Bridge pattern.

Although it doesn't specifically address the concerns about namespaces, my instinct tells me that the situations are similar. I would say, if you can avoid this, then you should.