Programming Articles

Data annotations are not only for use in ASP.NET web applications. Any type of .NET application can use data annotations for validating data. It only takes about 10 lines of code to programmatically validate data annotations attached to entity classes. There are many built-in data annotations supplied by Microsoft that can validate your data quickly and it's easy to create your own data annotation attributes to apply to your entity classes. If you have some very specific validation needs, you may implement the IValidatableObject interface for your entity classes. If you're developing multilingual applications, you can even move your error messages into resources and specify the name of those resources on each of your attributes.