NGWS SDK Documentation  

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5. Attributes

The Visual Basic 7.0 language enables the programmer to specify declarative information about entities defined in the program. For example, decorating a method in a class with the modifiers Public, Protected Friend, Protected, Friend, or Private specifies its accessibility.

Visual Basic 7.0 also enables programmers to invent new kinds of declarative information and to specify them for various program entities. For instance, a framework might define a HelpContext attribute that can be placed on program elements such as classes and methods to provide a mapping from program elements to documentation.

New kinds of declarative information are defined through the declaration of attribute classes, which may have positional parameters and data member/property initializers. The new declarative information is specified on entities through attribute sections. Individual attributes specified on declarations may be retrieved at runtime through the NGWS Runtime reflection. Reflection is a set of classes that provides users access to the descriptions of classes.