DeprecatedAttribute vs ObsoleteAttribute

[dnv-kimbell]

I recently updated to the latest version and everything built and looked fine. By accident I discovered an indicator when calling .Self() on a CspDirectiveBuilder. After doing some digging, I discovered that you had introduced a DeprecatedAttribute and a custom analyzer to report on it.

I couldn't see any trace of this in the output or error list list windows; only when hovering the cursor over the code.

If you had used ObsoleteAttribute, it would become a lot more visible and easier to detect.

Is there a particular reason for going down the custom DeprecatedAttribute path?

[andrewlock]

Is there a particular reason for going down the custom DeprecatedAttribute path?

Hi @dnv-kimbell, yep, adding new Warnings is a breaking change, so adding [Obsolete] attributes would be a breaking change 🙂 I didn't want people to update to the new version and their build be broken, but I also didn't want to do a major version bump, as that's also disruptive.

The [Deprecated] attribute is a middle-ground approach, in that you won't be broken by updating to a new version of the library, your header configurations work as they did before, but you can opt-in to increase the severity to warning or error in your project using an editorconfig file, e.g.:

[*.{cs,vb}]
dotnet_diagnostic.NEASPSH001.severity = error # API is deprecated
dotnet_diagnostic.NEASPSH002.severity = error # API is insecure

I meant to write a blog post and some extra docs about this but haven't gotten to it yet!