Introduction

.Net 4.5 introduced 3 new attributes: CallerFilePathAttribute, CallerLineNumberAttribute and CallerMemberAttribute which I think many of us might not even heard of. I came across this when I was reading Jon Skeet C# In Depth book.

Feature

By using these caller info attributes we can obtain the information about the caller to a method. You can get below information through this feature

• CallerFilePathAttribute – Full path of the source file that has the caller
• CallerLineNumberAttribute – Line number in the source file
• CallerMemberNameAttribute – Method or property name of the caller

All these attributes are available under System.Runtime.CompileServices. Just as with other C# attributes we can Omit the Attribute suffix from the name while using it

	class Program
	{
		static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			ShowInfo();
			Console.Read();
		}

		public static void ShowInfo([CallerFilePath] string file = null, [CallerLineNumber] int line = 0, [CallerMemberName] string member = null)
		{
			Console.WriteLine($"{file}:{line} - {member}");
		}
	}

Note: All these attributes must have a default value otherwise the compile will throw error.

Summary

This feature can come in very handy when we are doing logging in our application. Currently most of us will be using System.Diagnostics.StackTrace for building a stack trace to find out where the log information came from. But it is not advisable and may have performance implications.

Using this new feature logging can be done in a better way.