ContractN on CodePlex
I've just released the first beta version of ContractN, which is a fully managed programming-by-contract framework that uses the CLR's built-in support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP), which provides a way to seamlessly and intuitively describe the required pre- and post-conditions of a type's contract.
I got the idea based on this blog post by Sasha Goldshtein; although, Sasha's implementation and that of ContractN have little in common other than their purpose. I liked the way Sasha used dynamically-generated code, but other than that I wasn't satisfied having to create the extra stuff that was required to enforce conditions.
Advantages of ContractN
The real benefit of ContractN, IMO, is that there's no overhead in terms of setting up your classes or their consumers, and you don't have to worry about breaking encapsulation or having to create any supporting interfaces or classes. You just need to derive an object from ContractN.ProgrammingByContract. (It's a shame that this is required though - I hope AOP is eventually introduced as a C# language feature; although, I suspect that the CLR would have to participate as well to alleviate the need for subclassing.)
ProgrammingByContract is an abstract base class that sets up the AOP infrastructure, which is used to intercept method invocations and define conditions as attributes. After defining a class that inherits from ProgrammingByContract, simply add the appropriate attributes wherever you'd like to enforce certain conditions on the public contract of your type. Here's a really simple C# 3.0 example:
public class Person : ContractN.ProgrammingByContract
{
[InRequired, OutRequired]
public string Name { get; set; }
}
The example illustrates that there are some built-in conditional attributes for basic argument checking, such as InRequiredAttribute, OutRequiredAttribute and ReturnRequiredAttribute, which throw an exception when an argument (or in the case of the latter two, output parameters and a return value) are null. I plan to add more conditions in the future, and the framework was designed to be flexible enough so that you can define your own conditions as well.
Custom Conditions
To define a new condition, create a class that derives from either PreConditionBaseAttribute, PostConditionBaseAttribute or ConditionBaseAttribute and override the abstract members. Usage should be intuitive depending upon the implementation that you need, but you can look at the source code for InRequiredAttribute (beta 1) as an example.
Dynamic Conditions
I decided to take a different approach than Sasha in terms of how dynamic conditions are implemented. I wanted to take advantage of static type checking instead of hard-coding constraints as strings. PreConditionAttribute and PostConditionAttribute allow you to specify a method name on the decorated type that will be invoked automatically whenever any public method is called. That also includes constructors and accessors for properties and events. (Note that these attributes are also valid on a property, constructor, method or event.) The method signature can vary depending upon your needs; generally it will be a parameterless instance method, though static methods are allowed as well. The types of arguments that are accepted encapsulate information about a particular invocation. For example, you could define a method that accepts an argument typed as ContractN.PropertyCall and the method will be invoked automatically whenever a property get or set accessor is invoked, pre- or post-invocation depending upon the attribute used. Within these methods you can write code that will actually be part of the class that it's meant to constrain, which maintains encapsulation, makes it easy to share code between constraints and allows access to state with compiler support.
Here's a more sophisticated example than above. It makes use of pre- and post-conditions described above and also implements ad-hoc conditions by providing an implementation of ICondition:
[PreCondition("TestStatic")]
[PreCondition("TestInstance")]
class AdvancedFeatures : ProgrammingByContract, ICondition
{
#region Public Properties
public string TestProperty { get; set; }
#endregion
#region Methods
private static void TestStatic(PropertyCall info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre Static Property: {0}", info);
}
private static void TestStatic(MethodCallBase info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre Static Default: {0}", info);
}
private void TestInstance(MethodCallBase info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre Instance Default: {0}", info);
}
public void NoOperation()
{
}
#endregion
#region IPreCondition Members
void IPreCondition.Apply(ConstructorCall info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre: {0}", info);
}
void IPreCondition.Apply(MethodCall info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre: {0}", info);
}
void IPreCondition.Apply(PropertyCall info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre: {0}", info);
}
void IPreCondition.Apply(EventRegistrationCall info)
{
Console.WriteLine("Pre: {0}", info);
}
#endregion
#region IPostCondition Members
void IPostCondition.Apply(ConstructorCall info, MethodCallReturn returnInfo)
{
Console.WriteLine("Post: {0}", info);
}
void IPostCondition.Apply(MethodCall info, MethodCallReturn returnInfo)
{
Console.WriteLine("Post: {0}", info);
}
void IPostCondition.Apply(PropertyCall info, MethodCallReturn returnInfo)
{
Console.WriteLine("Post: {0}", info);
}
void IPostCondition.Apply(EventRegistrationCall info, MethodCallReturn returnInfo)
{
Console.WriteLine("Post: {0}", info);
}
#endregion
}
When the above class is used as follows:
AdvancedFeatures features = new AdvancedFeatures();
features.TestProperty = "A test value";
features.NoOperation();
The console output is:
Pre Static Default: ContractN.ConstructorCall
Post: ContractN.ConstructorCall
Pre: ContractN.PropertyCall
Pre Instance Default: ContractN.PropertyCall
Pre Static Property: ContractN.PropertyCall
Post: ContractN.PropertyCall
Pre: ContractN.MethodCall
Pre Instance Default: ContractN.MethodCall
Pre Static Default: ContractN.MethodCall
Post: ContractN.MethodCall
One of the really neat uses for the PreConditionAttribute that I've found is to have ObjectDisposedException automatically thrown instead of having to check for it everywhere. Here's an example that builds off of the Person class in my first example:
[PreCondition("NotDisposed")]
public class Person : ContractN.ProgrammingByContract, IDisposable
{
[InRequired, OutRequired]
public string Name { get; set; }
private bool disposed;
private void NotDisposed()
{
if (disposed)
throw new ObjectDisposedException(this.GetType().FullName);
}
public void Dispose()
{
disposed = true;
}
}
After the Dispose method is called, public members are no longer accessible to external types. All calls will result in ObjectDisposedException automatically!
Conclusion
ContractN is more of a hobby project for me now than anything else, but it has potential and I'd really like to see it blossom into something useful. If you have any suggestions for improvements please let me know and I'll consider them for the next beta release. (I'm going to establish a timeline on-the-fly as I get ideas for features.) I have some interesting ideas for new conditions and I hope to blog about them in the future, so don't wander too far off if you're interested...