Is the CallerMemberName attribute in 4.5 "able to be faked"?

.net, .net-4.5, wpf

Solution

Yes, you can, exactly as you could use LINQ and .NET 2, as you said. I use the following in a .NET 4.0 project with the VS2012 compiler with success:

namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices {

    [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Parameter, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
    public sealed class CallerMemberNameAttribute : Attribute {
    }

}

Be very careful that everyone on the project is using VS2012, otherwise they'll get silent bugs because `CallerMemberNameAttribute` didn't do anything and `null` was passed as the parameter default.

Edit 2013-06-28: Consider installing the Microsoft.Bcl NuGet package that provides `CallerMemberNameAttribute` (and some other classes from .NET 4.5) for .NET 4 and Silverlight rather than doing it manually.

Problem

So .NET 4.5 introduces the `CallerMemberNameAttribute`, which seems like a godsend to anyone working with WPF and implementing `INotifyPropertyChanged` - my question is this: Is the attribute intrinsically tied/supported by the 4.5 5.0 compiler, or is it more of a syntactical sugar helper by the environment, much like one could fake out Visual Studio by declaring an `ExtensionAttribute` of your own, magically turning on LINQ syntax? Edit: (sorry Jon!) I guess I'm asking if one can "enable" the functionality of the `CallerMemberNameAttribute` in .NET 4.0 via redeclaration of the attribute in the proper namespace, much like one can "enable" LINQ query syntax in .NET 2.0 by proper declaration of the `ExtensionAttribute` class. My strong suspicion is no, naturally... Put yet another way: I want to know if I can benefit from the functionality of `CallerMemberName` without upgrading to .NET 4.5/5 Hopefully that's more clear... NinjaEdit #2: Sigh...version numbering conventions are confusing!

Original source