VS IntelliSense - IFluentInterface / IHideObjectMembers trick does not work. Why?

Question

The IHideObjectMembers trick (a.k.a IFluentInterface) can be used e.g. in fluent interface implementations to hide System.Object members from IntelliSense. (If you don't know this trick, you can read up on it via the above link; I'm just repeating the interface's usual declaration here:)

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;

[EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)]
public interface IHideObjectMembers
{
    [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] bool Equals(object obj);
    [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] int GetHashCode();
    [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] Type GetType();
    [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] string ToString();
}

I'm now supposed to be able to hide System.Object members on another type as follows:

public class SomeClass : IHideObjectMembers { ... }

or:

public interface ISomeInterface : IHideObjectMembers { ... }

I tried this in both VS 2008 Express and VS 2008 Standard. However, no members are hidden from IntelliSense at all. I have used the EditorBrowsableAttribute in different projects and it always worked well; however, it doesn't work in this particular scenario.

If things had worked as expected, I would only have seen the SomeMethodTwo method.

Am I missing something?

---

P.S.: You can infer my example code from the declarations and the screenshot. I have a class SomeClass with a single dummy method called SomeMethodTwo. Very simple. I have not re-implemented the four System.Object methods in this class, as this should not be necessary.

Answer 1

The trick works if you don't use

var x = new SomeClass();

but explicitely use the interface that inherits from IHideObjectMembers

ISomeInterface x = new SomeClass();

var takes the Type of the concrete class. Thus IntelliSense will look for object.ToString() and not IHideObjectMembers.ToString(). The former is not decorated with the EditorBrowsableAttribute while the later is.

Daniel Cazzulino explicitely refers to interfaces in his post

we’ve done this with all the interfaces in our fluent API