.NET Information center: CLR Supported Custom Attributes

Sunday, March 11, 2012

After working with the CLR for more than a decade, once in a while I still run into surprising behavior.

It turns out that the (non pseudo-) custom attributes that CLR recognizes are only matched by name, not assembly.

So you can do this for example:

using System;

using System.Threading;

namespace System {

class ThreadStaticAttribute : global::System.Attribute { }

}

class Program {

[System.ThreadStaticAttribute]

static int foo;

public static void Main() {

WriteFoo();

foo = 42;