Examples of solutions using C# 5 Caller Information

Question

I am struggling to think of real-world usage of C# 5's Caller Information feature

In what scenarios do you need to know who called your method? What other usages does it have other than tracing and possibly debugging?

Is it an implementation of Aspect Oriented Programming?

One possible scenario just answered by @JonSkeet: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21230580/passing-a-methods-name-as-a-parameter — Arin Ghazarian, Jan 20 '14 at 10:03
It's not AOP, it's just that when need something like this, you can use either AOP or caller info. — svick, Jan 20 '14 at 11:20

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 20 '14 at 10:22

8

One really nice use for CallerMemberName is when working with WPF and databinding.

private void OnPropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string propertyName = null)

is a convenient implementation for INotifyPropertyChanged.

edited Jan 20 '14 at 10:22

Sam Leach

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answered Jan 20 '14 at 10:00

Zache

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '14 at 10:03

I am not sure whether it's AOP, but to me, it's very useful when implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. Actually Microsoft does give a nice sample about the difference between 4.0 and 4.5:

4.5: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.inotifypropertychanged.aspx

4.0: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.inotifypropertychanged(v=vs.100).aspx

it's pretty useful, especially when you do a lot databinding, either in WPF or WinForm. it reduces the use of error prone of hardcoding the property name, though you could use reflection to achieve similar behaviour.

Examples of solutions using C# 5 Caller Information

2 Answers2