What is global::?

Question

In C# I see global:: used quite often in auto-generated code. It is not something I have ever used myself so I don\'t know what the purpose is. Can someone ex

Answer 1

It's a sometime-necessary prefix indicating the root namespace.

It's often added to generated code to avoid name clashes with user code.

For example, imagine you had a class called System, but then you wanted to use System.String. You could use global::System.String to differentiate.

I believe the :: comes from C++ where it's used as a namespace separator.

In practice I've never used it, other than in generating code. Note that you can also get around some conflicts via using aliases. For example using String = System.String;