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  3. Code contracts, do you use them?

Code contracts, do you use them?

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  • S stefan seeland

    I am quite sure I missed somthing about the concept of contracts: Violation of contracts cause exceptions, exactly like violation of using code which is not designed to work with values without the corresponding contract with the drawback of splitting location of need of assumption. What are your reasons for using contracts?

    M Offline
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    Marc Clifton
    wrote on last edited by
    #44

    stefan seeland wrote:

    Violation of contracts cause exceptions, exactly like violation of using code which is not designed to work with values without the corresponding contract with the drawback of splitting location of need of assumption.
     
    What are your reasons for using contracts?

    Well, let's say you have a function that takes two numbers, persists them somewhere (maybe updating its own class' field values) and then returns the division result: double Divider(double n, double d) { Persist(n, d); return n/d; } The difference, with testing the parameter values first, is that you avoid the issue that something in the object's state (or some other system's state) has changed. Another example - if you could check every SQL transaction before executing it, then there wouldn't be any need for transactions and their accompanying rollbacks. Marc

    Reverse Engineering Legacy Applications
    How To Think Like a Functional Programmer
    My Blog
    Computational Types in C# and F#

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    • L lewax00

      Thanks, the article looks pretty in depth (only skimmed it for now, but it's bookmarked for later) :thumbsup:

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      Sentenryu
      wrote on last edited by
      #45

      lewax00 wrote:

      bookmarked for later

      And, again, "later" will never come :-O

      I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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      • S Sentenryu

        lewax00 wrote:

        bookmarked for later

        And, again, "later" will never come :-O

        I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

        L Offline
        L Offline
        lewax00
        wrote on last edited by
        #46

        It will, next time I work on a specific product, I'm always looking for ways to make the code for it cleaner since I've written all of it so far and it all reflects on my ability. (But normally you'd be right ;P )

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        • J Judah Gabriel Himango

          Sure, if you turn off static checking, you don't get any compiler warnings. In that sense, it's hardly better than if (foo == null) throw new...

          What I would expect to see is:

          public void DoSomething()
          {
          Contract.Requires(list != null);
          }

          Why would you expect to see a list null check? List is initialized at declaration to a guaranteed non-null value and cannot be reassigned due to the readonly modifier.

          My Messianic Jewish blog: Kineti L'Tziyon My software blog: Debugger.Break() Judah Himango

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          Sentenryu
          wrote on last edited by
          #47

          Judah Himango wrote:

          guaranteed non-null value and cannot be reassigned due to the readonly modifier

          FALSE. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7876333/modify-private-readonly-member-variable[^] and as i'm a CPian: Internals of Constants and Readonly[^]

          Quote:

          Please note that you can't declare it in any of the methods or ctors because, throughout your class instance life time, the readonly variable should be known and so its value. Hence it is declared in class scope and defined there itself or at object construction AKA ctor. But you can bypass this rule via reflection.

          What if someone is crazy enogh to do this?

          I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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          • S Sentenryu

            Judah Himango wrote:

            guaranteed non-null value and cannot be reassigned due to the readonly modifier

            FALSE. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7876333/modify-private-readonly-member-variable[^] and as i'm a CPian: Internals of Constants and Readonly[^]

            Quote:

            Please note that you can't declare it in any of the methods or ctors because, throughout your class instance life time, the readonly variable should be known and so its value. Hence it is declared in class scope and defined there itself or at object construction AKA ctor. But you can bypass this rule via reflection.

            What if someone is crazy enogh to do this?

            I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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            Judah Gabriel Himango
            wrote on last edited by
            #48

            You're being pedantic. Of course you can crack open the hood and fiddle with the members via reflection, but you could break all sorts of contracts that way, particularly invariants. In the same vein, you can use reflection to modify strings, which are supposedly immutable! Imagine all the havoc you could wreak... But that's not really helpful. In practice, readonlys are readonly. :)

            My Messianic Jewish blog: Kineti L'Tziyon My software blog: Debugger.Break() Judah Himango

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            • L lewax00

              It will, next time I work on a specific product, I'm always looking for ways to make the code for it cleaner since I've written all of it so far and it all reflects on my ability. (But normally you'd be right ;P )

              S Offline
              S Offline
              Sentenryu
              wrote on last edited by
              #49

              i'll look at it now, i liked the idea, but this post came literally 5 minutes before i leave the work :laugh:

              I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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              • J Judah Gabriel Himango

                You're being pedantic. Of course you can crack open the hood and fiddle with the members via reflection, but you could break all sorts of contracts that way, particularly invariants. In the same vein, you can use reflection to modify strings, which are supposedly immutable! Imagine all the havoc you could wreak... But that's not really helpful. In practice, readonlys are readonly. :)

                My Messianic Jewish blog: Kineti L'Tziyon My software blog: Debugger.Break() Judah Himango

                S Offline
                S Offline
                Sentenryu
                wrote on last edited by
                #50

                sorry if i sounded offensive, i posted that while trying to shut off the pc to get home :laugh: i was just pointing out that you should never trust the integrity of your data, even the internal readonly one. unless you are the only developer and the software will be used only internally, you can't assume no one will try to modify your internal data. BUT, for library code, you should never use private readonly anyway, i've had to much trouble with the MVC 3 model binder error messages on unobtrusive validation to know that ;P

                I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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                • M Marc Clifton

                  In particular, I was just perusing the Code Contracts[^] class in .NET 4 / 4.5, so I thought I'd take a quick survey of the community: 1. Do you routinely verify the expected parameter values that your method receives? 2. Do you verify post-conditions (you're method is returning something correct)? 3. Do you use the Contract class, or are you happy with Debug.Assert... and its variants? 4. Do you use your own variant, something like the Contract class? Just curious. :) Marc

                  Reverse Engineering Legacy Applications
                  How To Think Like a Functional Programmer
                  My Blog
                  Computational Types in C# and F#

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                  Fabio Franco
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #51

                  Unit testing is for the weak. I prefer Chuck Norris style :rolleyes:

                  To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia

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                  • S Sentenryu

                    sorry if i sounded offensive, i posted that while trying to shut off the pc to get home :laugh: i was just pointing out that you should never trust the integrity of your data, even the internal readonly one. unless you are the only developer and the software will be used only internally, you can't assume no one will try to modify your internal data. BUT, for library code, you should never use private readonly anyway, i've had to much trouble with the MVC 3 model binder error messages on unobtrusive validation to know that ;P

                    I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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                    Judah Gabriel Himango
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #52

                    You didn't sound offensive. Just pedantic.

                    Sentenryu wrote:

                    you should never trust the integrity of your data

                    Do you use strings? Do you sprinkle checks in your string code to verify no one used reflection to modify the strings? Of course not. Neither should we be concerned that readonlys are being modified through reflection.

                    My Messianic Jewish blog: Kineti L'Tziyon My software blog: Debugger.Break() Judah Himango

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                    • J Judah Gabriel Himango

                      You didn't sound offensive. Just pedantic.

                      Sentenryu wrote:

                      you should never trust the integrity of your data

                      Do you use strings? Do you sprinkle checks in your string code to verify no one used reflection to modify the strings? Of course not. Neither should we be concerned that readonlys are being modified through reflection.

                      My Messianic Jewish blog: Kineti L'Tziyon My software blog: Debugger.Break() Judah Himango

                      S Offline
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                      Sentenryu
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #53

                      Judah Himango wrote:

                      Do you use strings? Do you sprinkle checks in your string code to verify no one used reflection to modify the strings?

                      there's a way to modify strings parameters passed to a method? i don't know so much about reflection, so i'm not aware if you can get a local variable of a method using reflection, but i think there's no way (and i'm happy thinking this way ;) ) but i do check to se if the data i'm using meet the criterias of the method in question, unless there's no criteria. that includes data gathered through members of the class. sometimes i assume people will be kind enough to use the elephanting properties exposed by the class, but some people insist to remember me of horrors that appear when you don't do a sanity check on the data passed to you, like entire server going down because someone decided that would be fun to mess up with our authentication codes that were defined as private readonly string, better yet, you should see what the sunshine he put in place of the codes:

                      Quote:

                      My baby, baby, baby noo, My baby, baby, baby oo

                      the sunshine also deleted the TFS logs of the commit, and published this to production :mad: well, in a side note, sorry if i was pedantic, i have serious communication problems, and by text is even harder to say what i want in the tone i want :sigh:

                      I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

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