This is probably best shown with an example. I have an enum with attributes:

public enum MyEnum {

    [CustomInfo("This is a custom attrib")]
    None = 0,

    [CustomInfo("This is another attrib")]
    ValueA,

    [CustomInfo("This has an extra flag", AllowSomething = true)]
    ValueB,
}

I want to get to those attributes from an instance:

public CustomInfoAttribute GetInfo( MyEnum enumInput ) {

    Type typeOfEnum = enumInput.GetType(); //this will be typeof( MyEnum )

    //here is the problem, GetField takes a string
    // the .ToString() on enums is very slow
    FieldInfo fi = typeOfEnum.GetField( enumInput.ToString() );

    //get the attribute from the field
    return fi.GetCustomAttributes( typeof( CustomInfoAttribute  ), false ).
        FirstOrDefault()        //Linq method to get first or null
        as CustomInfoAttribute; //use as operator to convert
}

As this is using reflection I expect some slowness, but it seems messy to convert the enum value to a string (which reflects the name) when I already have an instance of it.

Does anyone have a better way?

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