Greg Young sat down with Rustan Leino and Mike Barnett of Microsoft Research to discuss Spec#. Spec# is a superset of C# and allows developers to impose contracts on their own code and verify it. This benefits developers by allowing them to find their own errors sooner saving time and resources.
The source code for Spec# is now available on CodePlex under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (non-commercial use only). It’s code verification tools, named Boogie, has been released under the Microsoft Public License, which conforms to Free/Open Source standards.
By far the most important feature of .NET 4.0 is support for a language agnostic design by contract framework. When used properly, design by contract has the ability to greatly reduce the potential for bugs in software while at the same time reducing the number of unit tests that need to be generated.
Last month Greg Young initiated a grass roots effort asking for Microsoft to release Spec#.
Version 1 of Spec# has been released. Spec# in a variant of C# that supports design by contract features such as a non-null type system, pre and post conditions, loop invariants, and object invariants.
