>>Apropos of nothing.....
>>I wonder whether, if you insert an intermediate class that does nothing, the compiler will just optimise it out of existence (ala partial methods).
>
>Sometimes the compiler acts in mysterious ways. <g>
>
>I've never actually had to look into what the compiler was optimizing in .NET, I know how to do that in C but I haven't gotten that far in .NET yet.

I thought about it a bit more and decided it wouldn't happen since you'd expect to be able to cast to the 'empty' class even though there would be no point to it. I like the idea behind partial methods though (even if I haven't got round to needing one yet)