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C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition
book

C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition

by Peter Drayton, Ben Albahari, Ted Neward
August 2003
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
32h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Defining a New Custom Attribute

In addition to using the predefined attributes supplied by the .NET Framework, you can also create your own.

To create a custom attribute, use the following steps:

  1. Derive a class from System.Attribute or from a descendent of System.Attribute. By convention the class name should end with the word Attribute, although this isn’t required.

  2. Provide the class with a public constructor. The parameters to the constructor define the positional parameters of the attribute and are mandatory when specifying the attribute on an element.

  3. Declare public-instance fields, public-instance read/write properties, or public-instance write-only properties to specify the named parameters of the attribute. Unlike positional parameters, these are optional when specifying the attribute on an element.

    The types that can be used for attribute constructor parameters and properties are bool, byte, char, double, float, int, long, short, string, object, the Type type, enum, or a one-dimensional array of all of these.

  4. Finally, as described in the preceding section, define what the attribute may be specified on using the AttributeUsage attribute.

Consider the following example of a custom attribute, CrossRefAttribute, which removes the limitation that the CLR metadata contains only information about statically linked types, but not dynamically linked ones.

// Xref.cs - cross-reference custom attribute // compile with: // csc /t:library XRef.cs using System; [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.All, ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005261Catalog PageErrata