I’ve been doing some work with the WCF REST Starter Kit for our website http://rocksolidknowledge.com. Preview 2 of the start kit has a bunch of client side plumbing (the original release concentrated on the service side)

The client side code looks something like this:

HttpClient client = new HttpClient("http://twitter.com");

HttpResponseMessage response = client.Get("statuses/user_timeline/richardblewett.xml");

Console.WriteLine(response.Content.ReadAsString());

As compact as this is I was a bit disappointed to see that I only had a few options for processing the content: ReadAsString, ReadAsStream and ReadAsByteArray. Now seeing as they had a free hand to give you all sorts of processing options I was surprised there weren’t more. However, one of the assemblies with the start kit is called Microsoft.Http.Extensions. So I opened it up in Reflector and lo and behold there are a whole bunch of extension methods in there – so why wasn’t I seeing them?

Extension methods become available to your code when their namespace is in scope (e.g. when you have a using statement for the namespace in your code). It turns out that the team put the extension methods in the namespaces appropriate to the technology they were exposing. So for example the ReadAsXElement extension method is in the System.Xml.Linq namespace and the ReadAsXmlSerializable<T> method is in the System.Xml.Serialization namespace.

Although I really like the functionality of the WCF Starter Kit, this particular practice, to me, seems bizarre. Firstly, it makes the API counter intuitive – you use the HttpClient class and then there is no hint in the library that there are a bunch of hidden extensions. Secondly, injecting your extensions into someone else’s namespace increases the likelihood of extension method collision (where two libraries define the same extension method in the same namespace). The same named extension method in difference namespaces can be disambiguated, the same named extension in the same namespace gives you no chance.

I think if you want to define extension methods then you should keep them in your own namespace – it makes everyone’s life simpler in the long run.