Programming by contract features coming in .NET 4.0!!!

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It happened! The BCL team proved me wrong (see my two previous posts), and I’m very happy that they did!

So, I’ve been sitting for the last couple of hours watching some of the many interesting PDC2008 sessions online. In particular the day 4 sessions “TL51 Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex” and “PC49 Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures” were extremely interesting from my perspective. In fact, I’m so excited to write this that I’m almost shaking!

What has gotten me so excited was the announcement that we will finally be able to do programming by contract with the next version of the .NET framework. And it will be integrated into VS2010 so we will see contract violations when compiling. Awesome! For those of you who know about the Spec# project, these new PbC features are the evolution of Spec# into something usable, not just by C# but by all .NET languages.

The TL51 session also talked about another extemely cool project called Pex which is now a Microsoft DevLabs project. The Pex project and the programming by contract features makes up a nice bug killing combo. So if you like bug-free code, like I do, you should pay very close attention to these projects in the future.

Finally I’d like to recommend that you go check out the PDC2008 session list. I’m sure you will find at least 1 or 2  interesting talks in there, though I suspect you will find many more. ;)