Comments on: More C# Attribute annoyances

By: [WTF] Generic attributes in C# | mnaoumov.NET

[WTF] Generic attributes in C# | mnaoumov.NET — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:45:30 +0000

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By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:35:07 +0000

It might be worth reading this article about dynamic attributes in c:
http://geekswithblogs.net/abhijeetp/archive/2009/01/10/dynamic-attributes-in-c.aspx

By: Damien

Damien — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:23:26 +0000

> passing a delegate would be fantastic eh!

Totally.

Best way I’ve found to get around this is pass in an array of enums, each mapped to an anonymous function.

By: Neil Mosafi

Neil Mosafi — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:24:23 +0000

Feeling your pain the Action one – passing a delegate would be fantastic eh!

By: Ray Houston

Ray Houston — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:53:29 +0000

@jimmy – A lot of the time we end up with an attribute that just takes a Type and we do all the crazy stuff outside the scope of the attribute.

[ValueConverter(typeof(EnumValueConverter
))]
public FormSubType FormSubType { get; set; }

The code that uses the attribute can ask it to create an instance of that type. At that point we check if it’s the right type and create and instance of it and return it. The disadvantage is that we don’t get compile time checking for the type but that really hasn’t been a problem.

By: bogardj

bogardj — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:43:43 +0000

@Paul

We do have some insight into *when* an attribute is instantiated – it’s when you query type/member info for its custom attributes. Maybe it’s from the fact that you can’t guarantee immutability after compilation for anything but a few special cases.

By: Paul Batum

Paul Batum — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:40:42 +0000

I agree with most of your complaints, but it makes sense to me that attribute arguments must be constants. Attribute instantiation is completely transparent – if an attribute is initialized from a mutable field, how can I reason effectively about what its value will be?