Validate feasibility of supporting new attribute types

[pellared]

Package

OpenTelemetry

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Per open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4602

Follows open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4614

The goal is to make sure that PRs like these are acceptable for OTel .NET:

• all: drop attribute values restrictions opentelemetry-proto#707
• [EndGoal] [DoNotMerge] Extend the set of attribute value types opentelemetry-specification#4636

What is the expected behavior?

Investigate whether it is possible and acceptable to extend the OTel .NET API and SDK with new attribute types.

Guidelines for evolving API/SDK: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/main/oteps/4485-extending-attributes-to-support-complex-values.md#how

Prototype in OTel Go demonstrating feasibility of adding new attribute types: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go#6809

Which alternative solutions or features have you considered?

n/a

Additional context

No response

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[pellared]

Adding support for complex attributes is possible.

This can be done by updating the implementation of

opentelemetry-dotnet/src/Shared/TagWriter/TagWriter.cs

Line 31 in 493032d

public bool TryWriteTag(

. Moreover, we could also introduce dedicated types for building complex values as suggested in https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/main/oteps/4485-extending-attributes-to-support-complex-values.md#api:

It's RECOMMENDED to expose an AnyValue type - the API representing complex or simple attribute value for type checking, ergonomics, and performance reasons.

@open-telemetry/dotnet-maintainers, can you please confirm?