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QuickDocId | 487 |
Written by | Imar Spaanjaars |
Posted | 02/19/2009 22:32 |
Page views | 5411 |
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DotNetAttributes is - as its name implies, a site dedicated to Attributes in .NET. In case you didn't know, attributes are little labels that you can apply to elements in .NET, like classes, assemblies, methods and more. Once attached to an element, you can retrieve and diagnose the elements at run-time to base your decision making logic on. If you're really new to attributes, be sure to check out the FAQs section of the site.
While there is documentation available in the MSDN library on most of the attributes, it's pretty much scattered throughout the library. Attributes are spread out over the framework, its assemblies and its namespaces, and so is the documentation about them in the library. To create a central location for everything you always wanted to know about attributes, I created www.DotNetAttributes.com.
Why? About one and a half year ago I ran into a blog post by Rick Strahl's about hiding ASP.NET controls from the toolbox. The solution to hide them from the toolbox was to apply a few attributes to the control's definition. In his post Rick said: "It really would be nice if there was one page that lists all the attributes that can be applied to a control, all the attributes that can be applied to a property, to events etc." I really liked that idea and it got stuck in my head for a long time, but I never had the time to actually do something with it. Until recently. I was working on a new ADO.NET Entity Framework application and all of a sudden I figured: it would be so easy to use the Entity Framework for a data model on attributes and then fill them with data that I can can gather by using reflection. It felt like I could do a bare-bones version in just a couple of hours.
And indeed, a couple of hours later I had a working model, a working - albeit very crude - reflection importer and a bare bones web site.
For a few weeks I spent some more time on the site and developed the following features:
The idea of the site is to give it to the community. This means everyone (with a valid account) can enter new code examples and relevant links for others to enjoy and learn from. I'll be adding my own descriptions, code and links as well, and I'll be moderating whatever is added to keep things focused and on-topic.
Currently, the site is in beta stadium and may be a bit flaky and buggy. I also need to fix up the design. If you find issues, or have suggestions to improve the site (design, availability of specific data, requests for namespaces), please let me know.
I'll be posting a bit more on this project in the near future, including a blog on how I auto generated the class diagrams. Stay tuned....
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QuickDocId | 487 |
Full URL | http://imar.spaanjaars.com/487/announcing-the-launch-of-dotnetattributescom |
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Written by | Imar Spaanjaars |
Date Posted | 02/19/2009 22:32 |