Is it possible to alias a sealed class in C#?

[Miguel Miguel]

Good morning, afternoon or night to all,

I have developed a small library of generics whose two classes, ReadOnlyDictionary<TKey, TValue> and InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary<TKey, TValue>, are wrappers around an also generic dictionary. Now, being developing another library, I would like to define a new, non-generic class, called for example DigitMapping, of type InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary<char, int>. At first I thought about using inheritance and define it simply as DigitMapping : InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary<char, int> with a custom constructor. The problem is that I marked this last class as sealed and I don't want to mark it as not being sealed. I also don't want to do another wrapper around this class for performance reasons. Do you have any ideia as to how can I accomplish this?

Of course, I want this alias to be public, not just use it like that in my code (which would be easy with the 'using' keyword).

Thank you very much.

[hype261]

I just read that you didn't want to do another Wrapper for performance reasons so I don't think the method I list below would work. Sorry.

I believe the Decorator design pattern solves this problem. The Decorator design pattern has two purposes: To dynamically add responsibilities to an object and to add client specified embellishment of a core object by recursively wrapping it.

So instead of ...

 
class DigitMapping : InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary
{
};
 
it would be
 
class DigitMapping
{
 
..Same interface as InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary...
 
private InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary<char, int> dictionary;
};
 
 

The methods and parameters of DigitMapping would just pass the calls to the methods of InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary. Traditionaly InvertibleReadOnlyDictionary and DigitMapping would both be derived from the same Interface, but nothing is saying you have to do that.