C# Automatic Properties can have Attributes

Simon — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:19:02 +0000

The MSDN documentation for Automatic Properties (a C# 3 language feature) states that attributes are not valid on automatic properties. This is not true, the following code compiles and works as expected:

public class Data
{
[XmlAttribute]
public int SomeNumber { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
using (XmlWriter w = XmlWriter.Create(@”c:\temp\test.xml”))
{
XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof (Data));
s.Serialize(w, new Data { SomeNumber = 5 });
}
}
}

Running this code results in an XML file looking roughly like this (I stripped some unneeded namespace declarations):

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

SomeNumber is saved as an attribute, so the XmlAttribute attribute worked correctly.

Microsoft Source Analysis Released

Simon — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:26:34 +0000

My team at work uses a fantastic Visual Studio add-in called Source Analysis to ensure consistency in our C# code formatting, commenting and organisation.

Source Analysis has now been released for the whole world to use, for free! The free download is available at the MSDN Code Gallery:

Source Analysis at Code Gallery

There’s also a blog here:

Source Analysis Blog

untidy blog » dotnet

C# Automatic Properties can have Attributes

Microsoft Source Analysis Released