What was the Historical Precursor for .NET Attributes?

Question

What languages or platforms influenced the .NET 1.0 Team to build-in the concept of Attributes from the very start? Was this an Aspect-Oriented thing? Serialization? or something else? I was still in VB6-land at this time, and never used any of the pre-1.0 .NET versions.

Answer 1

Believe it or not experiences/feedback from VB and Microsoft Transaction Server/COM+ dev teams had a bit part in some of the design rational of .NET, attributes and metadata.

VB6 added support for attributes/metadata that COM+/MTS could read and determine how an object should behave. Remember all those settings on your classes such as 'Requires Transaction', 'Requires New Transaction' and so on? They were effectively aspect orientated attributes. There's a great Don Box interview about all this somewhere, and when I find it again I'll post a link.

Answer 2

I don't know if this is the originator, but they have been around in COM and MIDL for a long time. There weren't user-defined ones, but you had to attribute methods, types, etc, etc to make specific claims about the contracts in MIDL.

Answer 3

Delphi/Object Pascal properties? If I remember correctly, one of the designers of Delphi is also one of the designers of .NET. The syntax is also similar.