Chapter 14. Custom Attributes

Types, members, modules, and assemblies all have associated metadata that is used by all the major CLR services, is considered an indivisible part of an application, and can be accessed via reflection (see Chapter 13).

A key characteristic of metadata is it can be extended. Extend the metadata with custom attributes, which allow you to "decorate" a code element with additional information stored in the metadata associated with the element.

This additional information can then be retrieved at runtime and used to build services that work declaratively, which is the way that the CLR implements core features such as serialization and interception.