Custom Attribute Providers

[Mark Schmidt]

VC++.NET ships with 2 attribute providers (one for the compiler and one for
ATL). Do you know if its possible to implement a custom attribute provider
that can be used for future projects?

[Lion Shi]

Hello Mark,

VS.NET 7.0 (or 7.1) doesn't provide a feature to custom native attribute
provider. This feature may be implemented in the next one or two version.
For the detailed information about the attribute provider please see the
"Attribute Providers" section of:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/04/Attributes/Attributes.asp

Hope this information is helpful.

Best regards,

Lion Shi, MCSE, MCSD
Microsoft Support Engineer

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
You assume all risk for your use. 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights
reserved.
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From: "Mark Schmidt" <mark_s...@vcd.NOSPAMhp.comNOSPAM>
Subject: Custom Attribute Providers
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 16:04:11 -0700
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[Ronald Laeremans [MSFT]]

To clarify what Lion said, there are no plans AT ALL to ever support _the
current mechanism_ user written attribute providers. The main reason is that
the interface between the compiler and the attribute providers is incredibly
fragile and in our own experience it is completely impossible to write,
debug and maintain an attribute provider without detailed knowledge about
the compiler internals and access to compiler source code. The secondary
reason is that there is no mechanism to allow multiple attribute providers
to work together correctly without some incestuous knowledge.

To the best of our estimate fixing these problems will amount to a complete
rewrite of the mechanism.

I would be very interested in your input on what you would like to use the
mechanism for since we are gathering input to see how desirable this rewrite
effort would be and what functionality would be critical to provide. Please
either reply here or in an email to me directly
(mailto:ron...@microsoft.com).

Ronald Laeremans
Lead Program Manager for the C++ compiler and libraries

"Mark Schmidt" <mark_s...@vcd.NOSPAMhp.comNOSPAM> wrote in message
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