Programming C# 4.0, 6th Edition

Chapter 17. Attributes and Reflection

As well as containing code and data, a .NET program can also contain metadata. Metadata is information about the data—that is, information about the types, code, fields, and so on—stored along with your program. This chapter explores how some of that metadata is created and used.

A lot of the metadata is information that .NET needs in order to understand how your code should be used—for example, metadata defines whether a particular method is public or private. But you can also add custom metadata, using attributes.

Reflection is the process by which a program can read its own metadata, or metadata from another program. A program is said to reflect on itself or on another program, extracting metadata from the reflected assembly and using that metadata either to inform the user or to modify the program’s behavior.

Attributes

An attribute is an object that represents data you want to associate with an element in your program. The element to which you attach an attribute is referred to as the target of that attribute. For example, in Chapter 12 we saw the XmlIgnore attribute applied to a property:

[XmlIgnore]
public string LastName { get; set; }

This tells the XML serialization system that we want it to ignore this particular property when converting between XML and objects of this kind. This illustrates an important feature of attributes: they don’t do anything on their own. The XmlIgnore attribute contains no code, nor does it cause anything to happen ...