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copied!<p>Personally I prefer the first solution, possibly with an additional property which returns <em>all</em> the values.</p> <p>It's much more OO - enums are basically "named numbers", that's all. Everywhere else in code, state is stored in properties - so why use attributes instead? As Eric Lippert wrote in a <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/02/02/properties-vs-attributes.aspx" rel="nofollow">blog post comparing the two</a>, "Attributes are facts about the mechanisms". You're basically using them as a way of providing data about values instead, and that just feels wrong to me.</p> <p>Your first two objections to using POCOs in terms of the potential mismatch between code and the database doesn't ring true either - because they're exactly the same for enums as well, aren't they? Besides, it's very easy to write a test which validates the data - you could even do so on startup if you wanted.</p> <p>It's not clear what the rest of your <code>AssetClass</code> does, but if it only has a <em>private</em> constructor, then you get a lot of the benefits of enums in terms of a limited, well-known set of values, but without the problem that enums are basically just numbers.</p> <p>In fact, the POCO solution is <em>better</em> than the enum in terms of value limitation - because the only "invalid" POCO value is null, whereas it's easy to come up with an invalid enum value:</p> <pre><code>FooEnum invalid = (FooEnum) 12345; </code></pre> <p>Are you going to check for that everywhere? Generally null references go bang considerably earlier than invalid enum values, and are also easier to check for.</p> <p>One downside I can think of in the POCO approach is that you can't switch on it. There are ways around that, but they're not terribly pleasant - you'd basically have to <em>also</em> have a set of well-known numbers (which could be an enum, of course) so that some property would return that and you could switch on it.</p>

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