What is the utility of the attribute GeneratedCodeAttribute in C #?

Question

I generated some of my C# code with an external tool. Each generated class has an attribute GeneratedCodeAttribute. Why is my generator creating this attribute?

Answer 1

It is most probably used by the generator to find back the elements it created, in order to perform updates for example. Beware if you modify generated code : depending on the tool behaviour, you may loose your modifications on a further update.

Answer 2

This attribute was set because this code is generated by tool, not by human :) what is use of it you might ask? MSDN tells us:

The GeneratedCodeAttribute class can be used by code analysis tools to identify computer-generated code, and to provide an analysis based on the tool and the version of the tool that generated the code.

Answer 3

One potential use is that Some coverage tools can skip code based on specified attributes. You can tell NCover to ignore code with this attribute.

Answer 4

The first link is its documentation and the second link is a detailed description of what this is for, why code generators produce it, and how code analyzers consume it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.codedom.compiler.generatedcodeattribute.aspx

and

http://blogs.msdn.com/fxcop/archive/2007/04/27/correct-usage-of-the-compilergeneratedattribute-and-the-generatedcodeattribute.aspx

Does that answer your question?