Based on my 14(+) years of C++ programming experience, I truly believe that inheritance is highly overrated, often misunderstood and abused therefore dangerous (among others, from security point of view). However I'm not in the camp that are saying that all classes must be sealed by default, because I believe that inheritance demand for strong name or publisher identity permission gives more flexible solution for that problem than sealing the class. Using inheritance demand means that we can still exploit beneficial sides of inheritance for in-house development, but will be protected from outside hackers exploiting our design mistakes. They got it right when added AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute, but regretfully they didn't made it the whole way down to allow us customizing what kind of implicit demands should be added to all public methods/types. It is my strong wish for the next version of .Net that it should be possible to specify our link and inheritance demands with AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (please, Microsof ;-). And evaluate them the same way as implicit FullTrust link demand (ignored for internal calls). And let us "OR" combine several strong name/publisher identity permissions too.
My 2c. -Valery. You can read messages from the Advanced DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from Advanced DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
