When you position the mouse cursor over a declaration that has been enhanced by an aspect, Visual Studio Tools for Metalama and PostSharp add a description of the aspect to CodeLens, and optionally to the IntelliSense tooltip. The description that PostSharp generates by default is sometimes not very helpful. To make the CodeLens and IntelliSense description of your aspect more understandable for its users, you should override the default description.
Simple aspects
Simple aspects are aspects built by deriving from a base class such as OnMethodBoundaryAspect and overriding virtual methods of the base class, such as OnEntry(MethodExecutionArgs). They are described in the section Developing Simple Aspects.
To set the description of a simple aspect, add the AspectDescriptionAttribute custom attribute to the aspect class.
This is illustrated in the following code snippet.
[PSerializable]
[AspectDescription("Applies the exception handling policy")]
public sealed class ExceptionHandlerAttribute : OnExceptionAspect
{
public override void OnException( MethodExecutionArgs eventArgs )
{
if ( !ExceptionHandler.OnException( eventArgs.Exception ) )
{
eventArgs.FlowBehavior = FlowBehavior.Continue;
}
}
}
Aspects with advice methods
Member-level, type-level and assembly-level aspects do not override methods of a base class. They declare advice methods with custom attributes such as OnMethodEntryAdvice, and possibly pointcuts such as MethodPointcut (see Developing Member-Level Aspects and Developing Type- and Assembly-Level Aspects). Unlike simple aspects, these aspects can have several advices.
With these aspects, you should add a description to every group of advices. You can do that by setting the Description property of the advice custom attribute. When PostSharp infers the group, set the description on one advice of the group only: several descriptions in one inferred group cause the error LA0231 (see Selecting Members with Pointcuts).
The following code snippet illustrates how to set the description of the advice. This description will appear in CodeLens and the IntelliSense tooltip of each property affected by this advice.
[OnLocationSetValueAdvice( Description="Persists the property to disk." ),
MulticastPointcut( Targets = MulticastTargets.Property,
Attributes = MulticastAttributes.Instance | MulticastAttributes.NonAbstract )]
public void OnPropertySet<T>( [This] object instance, [LocationValue] T value, [Binding] ILocationBinding<T> binding )
{
// Details skipped.
}