FriendAccessAllowedAttribute public?

[lukdr]

Would it be possible to make the System.Runtime.CompilerServices.FriendAccessAllowedAttribute public, to be more explicit and clearly state intent of what exactly should be visible to a friend assembly?

[jkotas]

dotnet/csharplang#1724

This would need to be combined with enforcement in Roslyn or some other tool be actually useful.

[lukdr]

Let me also add that InternalsVisibleToAttribute has a public bool AllInternalsVisible property which is supposed to be used together with FriendAccessAllowedAttribute as mentioned in the summary:

///     If AllInternalsVisible is not true for a friend assembly, the FriendAccessAllowed attribute
///     indicates which internals are shared with that friend assembly.

This is not possible as the latter is internal.

[jkotas]

This comment is left-over from the times when we have experimented with this in .NET Framework. .NET Core does not use it - we did not like the complexity associated with it.

The official documentation just says that this is not implemented.

[lukdr]

Thanks for the clarification, still it would be nice to have a more explicit and targeted way of making things visible to friend assemblies. This seemed like a possibility, as it is already used on some internal types in mscorlib.

[jkotas]

This attribute is gone from CoreCLR and mscorlib.

dotnet/csharplang#1724 tracks the language feature that this is really about.