adamjcooper

Hi littleguru,

There are two Design by Contact frameworks I know of that you can use today in C#. They both enforce checks at runtime, but take very different approaches and will appeal to very different audiences.

Kevin McFarlane has created an easy-to-use API that always enforces checks at runtime via calls to a Check object, such as:

Check.Require(0 < x < 5);

Check.Ensure(result < 3);

Check.Invariant(B.a > 0 and B.b > 0);


Philip Laureano offers a more complicated Design by Contract library as part of a larger library called LinFu. He uses a language-neutral, attributes-based approach for declaring contract checks. The advantage--or disadvantage, depending on your point of view--to Philip's approach is that the library is completely ignorant of the contract checks you assign, which means that when you call your library as normal, none of the checks will be made. In order for the checks to actually be enforced, you must use LinFu to create proxy versions of your classes with all the checks injected into the proxies. I get the impression this DbC approach is best used in conjunction with some sort of Dependency Injection framework, either LinFu's own or something like Spring.NET or Castle Windsor.

If you want a simple and lightweight API that bakes checks into your library so that they are always performed regardless of the caller, Kevin's API is probably your best bet. If you require your checks to be completely separate from your library to the point that they are optional, and if you're already working on an enterprise project using Dependency Injection, take a look at LinFu.DesignByContract2.

Hope that helps,
Adam.

This really is exciting stuff (in fact, I created a Channel9 user account just to respond to this video). Charles, I realize this isn't production-ready, but I can't tell you how much I'd like to start using this in my own work now.

I had the same question as stevo_ - What version of C# is this based on? Perhaps someone on the Spec# team can enlighten us on which, if any, newer features of C# are not currently supported in Spec#.

After the steady stream of language and CLR enhancements we've enjoyed--nullable types, generics, and all of the great new enhancements that have come with the dawn of LINQ--this seems like a natural next step. I'm very hopeful Microsoft will bake Design by Contract support into a future version of the CLR.

Here's my vote to see this make it's way into C# 4 and .NET 4.