Leonardo Paneque

.NET assemblies are superior to previous component technologies because they seamlessly provide multilingual support; introduce an excellent synergy between code and metadata; and inspire confidence through a strong type system and the .NET security policy. Nevertheless, .NET lacks a formal mechanism for specifying the semantics of the types offered by an assembly. This article shows how, using .NET attributes, it is feasible to introduce Boolean assertion clauses in .NET assemblies. Using reflection, these assertion attributes can be extracted, checked, and monitored at runtime. We offer an assertion browser tool that extracts the assertion attributes from the assemblies for documentation purposes and generates a "trusted" proxy assembly to monitor these assertions at runtime. Introduction Bertrand Meyer included the assertion formalism in Eiffel under his Design by ... (more)