Bit field enum Whenever you wish to express combinations of properties of an object, bit fields are a good way to accomplish this. As a simple example, consider a file in the file system. It can be Readable , Writable , Hidden or a combination these. The different attributes can be defined as an enum : [Flags] public enum FileAttribute { None = 0b0000; Readable = 0b0001; Writeable = 0b0010; Hidden = 0b0100; } To indicate that this enum is expected to be used as a bit field I have defined it with the FlagsAttribute . It is important to understand that the FlagsAttribute does nothing more than making some changes to how the ToString method of the enum works, making it possible to print out all flags. It does not introduce any validation or special treatment of the enum in any other way. I have defined the values of the different fields of the enum using binary representation, this should make it even more clear that this is a bit field and which bi