John Rusk on Extension Interfaces

Sorry for not blogging recently, I was ramping up and getting started in my new role on the C# team. I love it here! The people are great, the job is interesting and I'm really proud to work in C#. There are a lot of interesting things starting here, like F# or other very exciting projects I can't talk about at this point ;-)

 

I posted recently about duck-typing and extension interfaces. John Rusk pointed me to his great article about extension interfaces. It was posted back in 2006 but I only discovered it recently (sorry). It was interesting to see Keith Farmer's comments on the article, especially because I'm now sitting two offices down the hall from him so I could go and ask him what he thinks about it in person. But I digress.

 

I like John's ideas and considerations, and I currently can't think of any caveats of implementing extension interfaces from the design point of view. From the implementation perspective, there might be a complication John warns about. To make an existing class implement an interface, you'd usually write an adapter class. Now the problem is: a reference to the adapter object won't be the same with a reference to the actual target object, and that might become a problem, e.g. when you'd like to compare objects. Being constructive, John also points to a possible solution involving CLR internal special cases like TransparentProxy (see an as-always-excellent post by Chris Brumme about it).