What is difference between DisplayName attribute and Display attribute in ASP.NET MVC?


DisplayName sets the DisplayName in the model metadata. For example:

[DisplayName("foo")]
public string MyProperty { get; set; }

and if you use in your view the following:

@Html.LabelFor(x => x.MyProperty)

it would generate:

<label for="MyProperty">foo</label>

Display does the same, but also allows you to set other metadata properties such as Name, Description, ...

Brad Wilson has a nice blog post covering those attributes.


They both give you the same results but the key difference I see is that you cannot specify a ResourceType in DisplayName attribute. For an example in MVC 2, you had to subclass the DisplayName attribute to provide resource via localization. Display attribute (new in MVC3 and .NET4) supports ResourceType overload as an "out of the box" property.