Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Attributes

Attributes are classes deriving from the System.Attribute class and provide declarative information to objects or members they are applied to, providing also the ability to change their behavior. As a convention, applying an attribute is also known as decorating or marking a member. Attributes are basically class instances; you can apply attributes enclosing their names within < > symbols; moreover they can receive arguments. The following are examples of decorating members with attributes:

In the preceding snippets, the Serializable attribute creates a new instance of the System.SerializableAttribute class that indicates to the compiler ...