Wes' Puzzling Blog

I looked back in your blog but didn't see mention of nContract. (I was sure I saw it somewhere...) Might nContract be a form of "Design by Contract", similar to that implemented in Eiffel? If not, could you compare and contrast? (Just a short sentence or two...)

Regardless, program testabilty/verifiabilty/provability/trustworthiness has always been an interest of mine, and just the diagram alone has piqued my interest. I'm looking forward to reading your thesis and trying nContract out! (It could be the most interesting tool that's missing from VSTS2005!)

Good luck on your defense!

There has been mention on my blog about my thesis and a hint that it deals with DBC but this is the first time I publicly stated the title nContract.

It is sort of like DBC in Eiffel but not exactly. You use attributes to provide pre/postconditions etc, then nContract generates a subclass which contains all the contract checking code i.e. assertions for pre/post etc. Then the client app would use a factory call to create objects and if checking code is enabled then an instance of the subclass is generated otherwise an instance of the original class is created.

That is a very brief overview. I will talk more about it in future posts, so stay tuned.

You should look at MS Fugue from Microsoft Research. Fugue is a research project that does exactly what you outline above. I've been using Fugue to control state machine usage for almost a year now.

White Paper
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=733

Download
http://research.microsoft.com/~maf/projects/fugue/index.htm

weird. I started writing and your comment to the previous responder popped up. I guess based on the compilation stuff it's different. Fugue doesn't use subclassing. Fugue is more along the lines of development time analysis not runtime operations.

I think you're going to have a hard time convincing the board that "Component Developers" wear ties... :P

Good luck :)

Thanks for the link Paul. This is the first time I've heard of Fugue. I am most definitely going to read their paper and figure out exactly what they are doing.

Brock - Yeah that is a little far fetched. In my defense that was the first image I found in MS clipart that was close to what I wanted and I was too lazy to hunt for any others. ;)

Are you going to get your masters degree or phd? What is this defense for? Thanks.

All the best.

who is the gay man in the picture?
he's hot!

Ron - This is my Masters of Science in Computer Science degree.

Good luck today Wes!