title: Where is the Friend access modifier intended to be used?
body: <p>The only place I've seen the Friend modifier used is in the WinForms designer, as alluded to in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3707055/why-is-the-modifier-set-to-friend-in-winforms">Why is the modifier set to Friend in Winforms?</a> and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2772815/vb-net-what-does-the-friend-modifier-do">VB.NET: what does the &#39;friend&#39; modifier do?</a>.</p>
  
  <p>The Friend modifier appears to be an almost arbitrarily wide access level that was created to solve some historic architectural problem in VB, I just wonder if anyone has a meaningful continued use for it?</p>
  
  <p>I have had some desires to expose methods only to a given namespace so as to roll the functionalities of a related collection of objects together and manage any of their non-thread-safe methods, while exposing the safe public methods to a wider scope in the same assembly. This access level does not exist yet Friend does. Possibly a corollary question then, is my usage of assemblies and namespaces at odds with what is intended?</p>
  
  <p>In many cases it is not possible to separate functionality into different assemblies because of the strict hierarchy that assemblies have, which leads to having groups of related but separate objects that have access to each other's unsafe methods.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong>
  While I know the function of the modifier, I am curious as to what practical purposes people have for it as I have not come across a situation where it would be the right solution.</p>