.NET CodeContracts Microsoft Corporation

.netcodecontracts devlab9ts devlabs_ts dotnetcodecontracts microsoft-code-contracts microsoftcodecontracts

Use this command to install .NET CodeContracts:

winget install --id=Microsoft.DotNet.CodeContracts -e

.NET CodeContracts is a development tool designed to enforce design-by-contract principles in .NET applications. It allows developers to define pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants, ensuring that code behaves as expected and improving software reliability.

Key Features:

Design-by-Contract: Express coding assumptions using pre-conditions, post-conditions, and invariants, making the code more predictable and maintainable.
Runtime Checking: Contracts are checked during execution, acting as oracles to validate program behavior and improve testing quality.
Static Checking: A static verifier analyzes contracts without runtime overhead, identifying potential violations before deployment.
Documentation Generation: Contracts can be integrated into XML documentation, providing clear and comprehensive API documentation for users.
Language-Agnostic Support: Works across all .NET languages, ensuring consistency in code quality regardless of the programming language used.

Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for .NET developers aiming to build robust, maintainable applications. By enforcing contracts, developers can reduce bugs, improve test coverage, and ensure that code adheres to specified requirements. The tool is particularly beneficial for teams focused on long-term code health and reliability.

.NET CodeContracts can be installed via winget, making it easy to integrate into development workflows.

CodeContracts

Source code for the CodeContracts tools for .NET

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs.

The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages. We currently provide three tools:

Runtime Checking. Our binary rewriter modifies a program by injecting the contracts, which are checked as part of program execution. Rewritten programs improve testability: each contract acts as an oracle, giving a test run a pass/fail indication. Automatic testing tools, such as Pex, take advantage of contracts to generate more meaningful unit tests by filtering out meaningless test arguments that don't satisfy the pre-conditions.
Static Checking. Our static checker can decide if there are any contract violations without even running the program! It checks for implicit contracts, such as null dereferences and array bounds, as well as the explicit contracts.
Documentation Generation. Our documentation generator augments existing XML doc files with contract information. There are also new style sheets that can be used with Sandcastle so that the generated documentation pages have contract sections.

Quick Links

Building from source

For working on the project, open CodeContracts.sln and build.

To create the installer and the nuget package, just run buildCC .

We use the convention:

CC major version = 1.9.1
CC minor version = {month}{day}.{buildInTheDay}

.NET CodeContracts Microsoft Corporation

README

CodeContracts

Quick Links

Building from source