Why just dont return dictionary or NameValue as property??? Then you can create your custom field?

Also,if you want to pass Enum with description,you can put attributes like Description("test") on Enum values.

That's actually what I'm trying to do, but unless I'm missing something, you can't pass a dictionary as a parameter to an attribute.   It give the error, "constant expression is required".    You can't pass the dictionary through the constuctor nor to a field or property.  

That would be perfect if we could, as all of our lookup data comes from dictionarys or key/value type collections.    I think that we've already dismissed the possibility of using an enum, because you can't have a name and a value if they're both strings, and the name cannot have spaces or special characters.

 At this point, I'm thinking that the best option might be to pass in a property name as a string, and use reflection to call it...

<AvailableItems("LookupData.StatusCodes")>_

then use reflection so call the property and retrieve the dictionary, assuming that 'LookupData' is the static class, and StatusCodes is a property that returns a dictionary.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

Try this, I know its in c# but you should be able to work it out  

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = true)]
public class TablePermissionsAttribute : System.Attribute
{
	// this property is required to work with "AllowMultiple = true" ref David Ebbo
	// As implemented, this identifier is merely the Type of the attribute. However, 
	// it is intended that the unique identifier be used to identify two 
	// attributes of the same type.
	public override object TypeId { get { return this; } }

	/// <summary>
	/// Constructor
	/// </summary>
	/// <param name="permission"></param>
	/// <param name="roles"></param>
	public TablePermissionsAttribute(Permissions permission, params String[] roles)
	{
		this._permission = permission;
		this._roles = roles;
	}

	private String[] _roles;
	public String[] Roles
	{
		get { return this._roles; }
		set { this._roles = value; }
	}

	private Permissions _permission;
	public Permissions Permission
	{
		get { return this._permission; }
		set { this._permission = value; }
	}

 in c# we would use the params key word to set this up, see the vb that a c#->vb converter did:

Public Sub New(ByVal permission As Permissions, ParamArray roles As String()) 
    Me._permission = permission 
    Me._roles = roles 
End Sub 

Thanks for this suggestion.  Using the ParamArray is not somthing we had considered.  

 Though this will help in some cases where the array is a small, static set of items, we still need a way that large sets of items can be passed in a dynamic way.   After much research, I've concluded that there is no way to pass an object like an array or dictionary to a parameter, unless the attribute declaration contains the expression.

 For the time being, we've settled on using a delimited parameter string, ex:  <AvailableItems("Red=R|Blue=B|Green=G")> ... that way a property could still be called that dynamically created the string, ex:  <AvailableItems(LookupData.ColorsString)>