Date: Aug. 25, 2001
Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progcsharp/
Source Author or Organization: Jesse Liberty, O'Reilly & Associates

This article is excerpted from Programming C# by Jesse Liberty, an O'Reilly & Associates book on the new language for Microsoft's .NET platform. Attributes and Reflection looks at the language's support for metadata.

Code, data and metadata (information about the data) are the components of a .NET application. C# offers low level control for creation and use of metadata.

This chapter discusses how the C# programmer will work with attributes, including custom attributes the programmer is allowed to create for his own use. It also covers the classes in the reflection namespace, which provide the facility for viewing metadata, performing type discovery, creating types at runtime (reflection emit) and late binding to methods and properties.