Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Programming with Attributes

Sometimes you need to provide metadata about the capabilities of your code. This metadata is meant to tell other code that is inspecting your code (through reflection) specific things about what the code might do. This includes information for the .NET runtime such as how you want your code compiled. There are many attributes available in the .NET Framework. You can also create your own, custom attributes to be applied to your code. In this case, you can write code to examine the metadata about your own application.

Declarative attributes can be applied to classes, properties, methods, parameters, and other elements inside your code. You can apply a single attribute or multiple attributes to an application. Some attributes ...