custom attribute changes in .NET 4

Posted by Sarah Vessels on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sarah Vessels
Published on 2010-06-01T17:43:49Z Indexed on 2010/06/01 17:53 UTC
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I recently upgraded a C# project from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4. I have a method that extracts all MSTest test methods from a given list of MethodBase instances. Its body looks like this:

return null == methods || methods.Count() == 0
    ? null
    : from method in methods
      let testAttribute = Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(method,
          typeof(TestMethodAttribute))
      where null != testAttribute
      select method;

This worked in .NET 3.5, but since upgrading my projects to .NET 4, this code always returns an empty list, even when given a list of methods containing a method that is marked with [TestMethod]. Did something change with custom attributes in .NET 4?

Debugging, I found that the results of GetCustomAttributesData() on the test method gives a list of two CustomAttributeData which are described in Visual Studio 2010's 'Locals' window as:

  1. Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.DeploymentItemAttribute("myDLL.dll")
  2. Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestMethodAttribute() -- this is what I'm looking for

When I call GetType() on that second CustomAttributeData instance, however, I get {Name = "CustomAttributeData" FullName = "System.Reflection.CustomAttributeData"} System.Type {System.RuntimeType}. How can I get TestMethodAttribute out of the CustomAttributeData, so that I can extract test methods from a list of MethodBases?

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