Partial Classes. Totally Stupid?

I made it through, of course. The pupils that were ahead of the game realized it was due to partial classes, and the rest just kind of got along. We ignored one of the boxes and that helped some, but that's really not right -- those UI components are really inside my form class, and it was important for me to show how they added complexity.

Since then, I've been thinking about partial classes, and aside from making Microsoft's products LOOK better, i think they are the worst thing I've seen in a language in a long time. Let's review, shall we?

Partial classes are set up like this:

public partial class foo
{
your code here
}

Then later on, somewhere else in your project, you can have something like this:

public partial class foo
{
MORE of your code here
}

That way, part of your class can be in one file, and part of your class can be in another file! But the fun is just beginning, folks. You can have as many of these little constructs as you like. Your class "foo" can be scattered all over your project -- the UI, the busines layer. Heck. As far as I know, you can include partial classes from external libraries. (maybe not so sure, but with the Code DOM you certainly can contiue to add onto your foo-monster as much as you want. It's everywhere! It's everywhere!)

Does anybody besides me see a problem here? And please, don't give me the old "bad coding practices are the responsibility of the developer, not the language provider". That's total BS. A good language only allows you to cut your foot off with power tools if the power tools are powerful enough to justify the risk to the developer.

Looking at this feature. Huh? As best as I can figure, we have partial classes to make the IDE UI look cooler. Oh joy. Instead of seeing some UI code that us heathens are not allowed, now that magic code is hidden away from the rubes, er, novice programmers. I'm sure a similar benefit is realized in the web pipeline. (although I can hear MS Architects complaining now. Bring it on, guys)

I read on one blog where somebody was praising partial classes because "different programmers can work on different parts of the class in isolation" WTF? I couldn't read this without laughing. The whole purpose of having a class in the first place is having all the stuff related to one thing in one place! By splitting it up into infinite little tiny pieces, they have taken the entire idea of classes and made a complete mess out of it. Now instead of having properties and methods and hidden code in one spot for you to check out and modify, you can have it in 15 pieces. That's a big improvement, all right. I can't wait to get the pleasure of checking out piece 7 of 16 to change one method. Hey Jim, Sue, and Tom! Are you guys finished with those other 7 pieces? Because we got to do unit testing. Somehow.

One guy said that partial classes were good to "separate the UI from the user-added code" LOL! Give me a break! That's what architectural tiers are for (which is what I was teaching the class on) Perhaps now we can have a tiered architecture inside a class? That will be a lot of fun.

Look. I can understand why software companies have to keep adding features into their code to make regular releases. It gives the appearance of making progress, and you can't have four hundred developers sitting around playing Donkey Kong all day. Got to give them something to do. Let's not forget the bottom line, guys! That's why, for instance, that you can launch an MX Nuclear Missile from one of the spelling menus inside Microsoft Word. But please, guys, don't make the same mistakes in your development platform! I don't want to wake up sometime in the future and a platform that does so much it does nothing at all very well.

If you've got a good reason we need partial classes, I'd like to hear it. I've thought about it a lot over the past week, and to me it looks like the language disaster from hell. If .NET keeps getting bloat like this, it will be just another C++ before the decade is over: a language where you can do everything so many ways that it becomes so easy it is extremely difficult to do well.

My two cents only.