Support for design by contract™ in the C# programming language

Abstract

There is evidence that "contracts," or assertion techniques involving preconditions, postconditions, and invariants, have a positive effect on overall software quality. Regrettably, very few programming languages support these techniques. Since the advent of Bertrand Meyer's Design by Contract™ method, introduced in the language Eiffel, a number of systems have been built to implement support for contracts in more commonly-used languages. Such support has not been satisfactorily implemented in C#. In this paper, we compare the different approaches of existing systems and introduce Contract Sharp, a tool that provides support for contracts in C#. © JOT, 2005.