What is an empty interface used for

Question

I am looking at nServiceBus and came over this interface

namespace NServiceBus
{
    public interface IMessage
    {
    }
}

What is the us

Answer 1

Normally it's similar to attributes. Using attributes is a preferred to empty interfaces (at least as much as FxCop is aware). However .NET itself uses some of these interfaces like IRequiresSessionState and IReadOnlySessionState. I think there is performance loss in metadata lookup when you use attributes that made them use interfaces instead.