Hiding inherited members

Question

I'm looking for some way to effectively hide inherited members. I have a library of classes which inherit from common base classes. Some of the more recent descendant classes inherit dependency properties which have become vestigial and can be a little confusing when using IntelliSense or using the classes in a visual designer.

These classes are all controls that are written to be compiled for either WPF or Silverlight 2.0. I know about ICustomTypeDescriptor and ICustomPropertyProvider, but I'm pretty certain those can't be used in Silverlight.

It's not as much a functional issue as a usability issue. What should I do?

Update

Some of the properties that I would really like to hide come from ancestors that are not my own and because of a specific tool I'm designing for, I can't do member hiding with the new operator. (I know, it's ridiculous)

Answer 1

Override them like Michael Suggests above and to prevent folks from using the overridden (sp?) methods, mark them as obsolete:

[Obsolete("These are not supported in this class.", true)] public override  void dontcallmeanymore() { } 

If the second parm is set to true, a compiler error will be generated if anyone tries to call that method and the string in the first parm is the message. If parm2 is false only a compiler warning will be generated.

Answer 2

While you cannot prevent usage of those inherited members to my knowledge, you should be able to hide them from IntelliSense using the EditorBrowsableAttribute:

Using System.ComponentModel;  [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] private string MyHiddenString = "Muahahahahahahahaha"; 

Edit: Just saw this in the documentation comments, which makes it kinda useless for this purpose:

There is a prominent note that states that this attribute "does not suppress members from a class in the same assembly". That is true but not complete. Actually, the attribute does not suppress members from a class in the same solution.