Earlier this week, a friend of mine (read his great blog here ) had tried to explain me why attributes were useful. We ended up with an extension method that reads attributes of enum values. Today I have the time to really think about that and I've just realized - this has tons of potential! Consider the following scenario - you have the following class: public string GetCityName( long userID) { // // Get data from some datasource... // return "Ney York City" ; } And now you're...