<p>When I add an assembly reference to a project in Visual Studio 8 the Aliases property, of that reference, is set to "global".  What is this property good for and why is it set to global?</p>

<p>MSDN tells me that this is a list of aliases for the assembly but not why I might want to use this property or why most are aliased as "global".</p>

<p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vslangproj80.reference3.aliases.aspx" rel="noreferrer">MSDN reference</a></p>

Search for "
extern alias
"; it is a very rarely used feature that is only needed to disambiguate between two dlls that contribute the same types (for example, two different versions of the same assembly, or two assemblies that have a class which shares a fully-qualified-name).
"global" is the default. For example, if you have a class called
```
Foo.System
```
, you can unambiguously refer to the main
```
System
```
namespace via
```
global::System
```
.