Question

What advantages do attributes have over the use of comments (or xml comments at the signature level)? I do remember seeing a thread in the C# section of this site somewhere, but I can’t find it now.

Also, is it possible to apply an attribute to a specific parameter in a method (this was an interview question I read somewhere)?

Answer 1

Comments are just for the benefit of developers, so that they can see what classes and methods are about.

Attributes are useful to the solution you are developing as you can use then to describe how to work with the class you are adding attributes to.

Yes you can use attributes against parameters, but in my experience this makes for some complicated code, consider redesigning so your params can be grouped into a struct or class.

Here’s a link about attributes:

http://en.csharp-online.net/Attributes

Hope this helps