Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++® .NET in 24 Hours

Attributes and the Build Process

In the last hour, you saw how tags were used as replacements for dynamic content. A client first requests a server response file (SRF) from IIS. The Web server parses the file until a replacement tag is found. Once the tag has been parsed and is shown to be syntactically correct, IIS then hands control over to a replacement handler. It is then up to the replacement handler to either return an HTTP_CODE or render content to the response stream.

In much the same way ATL Server uses a replacement methodology for tags, the C++ compiler performs a similar function using attributes. An attribute is placed within a source file and is surrounded by bracket symbols ([attribute]). When you invoke the build process, the ...