Attributes vs. CustomAttributes in PropertyInfo

Question

I've been working with Reflections and wanted to get all the attributes declared for a property. There are two properties under PropertInfo class which are CustomAttributes and Attributes.

According to the MSDN, they are explained as follows:

Attributes:

This property represents the attributes associated with a member. All members have a set of attributes that are defined in relation to the specific type of member. The property attributes let the user know if this property is the default property, a SpecialName property, and so on.

Note: The code sample given in the PropertyInfo.Attributes page doesn't even work.

Custom Attributes:

An array that contains all the custom attributes applied to this member, or an array with zero elements if no attributes are defined.

However, when I run this code for them, Attributes returns nothing while CustomAttributes returns Required.

void Main() {     var attributes = typeof(Myproperty).GetProperty("Caption").CustomAttributes;     //var attributes = typeof(Myproperty).GetProperty("Caption").Attributes;     attributes.Dump(); //Dump is a LinqPad method which dumps everything to the outpu window }  public class Myproperty {     private string caption = "Default caption";      [Required]     public string Caption     {         get{return caption;}         set {if(caption!=value) {caption = value;}         }     } } 

Answer 1

PropertyInfo.Attributes doesn't have anything to do with the Attribute class. Check the PropertyAttributes enumeration for values you may encounter. These are CLR implementation details that have no obvious connection to C# code. Yes, that was an unfortunate naming choice.

To find attributes like your [Required] attribute you must use the CustomAttributes property.