Jeroens blog

Last week I went to a VISUG and MSDN event in Brussels where Scott Guthrie held 3 talks about VS2010, Silverlight 4, asp.Net and MVC. The event was very interesting, but I’m not going to dwell on the contents.

Everyone got a red tshirt to wear, as can be seen on the underneath photo. Somewhere near the end of the second session, I got to warm wearing the tshirt, and put it in my bag. I had no idea that my blue Google Maps tshirt would be so visible though. Setting in the middle of the room, this wasn’t really subtle if I look at it now, esp since it says “I am here”

This is the model of tshirt I was wearing:

Yesterday I went to my first VISUG event. VISUG stands for Visual Studio User Group and is the independent professional user group for Microsoft Visual Studio users in Belgium. The presentation, titled “C# 4.0 and testability”, and given by Dino Esposito, addressed the importance of testability in applications, and how this is made easier with code contracts.

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants. They act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification (yay!), and documentation generation. In short, they bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages.