class - Why/when should you use nested classes in .net? Or shouldn't you?

Question

In Kathleen Dollard's 2008 blog post, she presents an interesting reason to use nested classes in .net. However, she also mentions that FxCop doesn't like nested classes. I'm assuming that the people writing FxCop rules aren't stupid, so there must be reasoning behind that position, but I haven't been able to find it.

Answer 1

Use a nested class when the class you are nesting is only useful to the enclosing class. For instance, nested classes allow you to write something like (simplified):

public class SortedMap {
    private class TreeNode {
        TreeNode left;
        TreeNode right;
    }
}

You can make a complete definition of your class in one place, you don't have to jump through any PIMPL hoops to define how your class works, and the outside world doesn't need to see anything of your implementation.

If the TreeNode class was external, you would either have to make all the fields public or make a bunch of get/set methods to use it. The outside world would have another class polluting their intellisense.