Hi,
> Unless there is an official announcement from the BCL team regarding compiler / language integration
I doubt CC will ever be integrated into the compiler. That's not a good metric as to whether Code Contracts is "dead".
As Eric Lipper puts it:
Now, you might note that tools like the Code Contracts feature [snip] all have various abilities to statically detect possible or guaranteed null dereferences. Which proves that it is possible to do a good job of this feature, and that's good
to know. But that is also points against doing the warning in the compiler. [snip] [I]f an existing analysis tool does a good job, then why replicate that work in the compiler? The compiler does not aim to be the be-all and end-all of code analysis; in fact,
we are building Roslyn precisely to make it easier for third parties to develop such analysis tools. We can't possibly do every great code analysis feature, but we can make it easier for you to do so!
I have a feeling that the CC team is investing heavily in Roslyn, which may be why we haven't seen much from them in terms of CC updates and VS 2012 integration.
> Project started ~ 2008 (probably before) and we've had 2 major iterations of VS. If it's not out of devlabs by now, it'll never be.
Maybe Roslyn is the target. Regardless, if the tool is useful, then what's so bad about the "devlabs" label? I'd like to have something "official" as well, but let's face it, being official doesn't guarantee anything but a
support channel. It makes no real guarantees about the lifetime of a product, at least in terms of updates and VS integration.
> There appeared to be no resources assigned to ensuring VS2012 compatibility with a sync release (hint: nobody cared).
Again, let's at least wait until Roslyn is released, or an update of CC is released before VS vNext, or the CC team actually states that CC is "dead"; whichever comes first.
> The Contracts dev team have gone radio silent (hint: they're not working on it any more).
This is just plain wrong. Manuel just responded to
this post 4 days ago. Please get your facts straight before starting rumors :)
Also noteworthy is Manuel's comments, implying intention to possibly fix the reported issue in a future release:
The only work around at the moment is to disable the rewriter for the debugging session.
> The community are abandoning it
Really? What makes you think that? Once a tool or library becomes fairly stable, it's only natural for the number of active threads in its usability forum to decrease. But this forum is still certainly in use for people asking questions
and getting answers. Though perhaps most of the posts are simply unanswered bug reports, but that doesn't mean that nobody is reading them or fixing the bugs.
> It's companion project, PEX, is discontinued (with a part making it into MSTest).
That's a completely different project. I don't see how it's a "companion" at all, except maybe that they were being developed at around the same time and maybe even some of the same people were involved at one point, though I don't even know
if that's true.
> There appears to be a de-emphasis on static managed languages in MS with a resurgence of C++/COM [snip] JS (or TypeScript).
Roslyn.
> The static analyser was always buggy it may be either the problem is just too difficult to properly solve [snip]
For me and I assume many others, Code Contracts has been and will continue to be an extremely useful tool. Admittedly, the lack of support for
async/await and iterator blocks makes it somewhat limiting though. But there will always be bugs and limitations.
It can never be perfect.
> I'm in the process of scrubbing my code base and am nearly there. Lesson learned: do
not rely on a DevLabs project.
That seems really premature and also a bit pointless if you were actually getting value from using Code Contracts.
Perhaps the only proper metric to determine whether Code Contracts is "dead" or not is whether or not we get a new release in the future. We aren't entitled to one, nor are we entitled to be told when we will get one, so we can't really
know whether it's dead unless they explicitly tell us that we won't be receiving any more updates, and I haven't seen such a message from the CC team yet.
My hope is that they are simply investing heavily in Roslyn and it's taking up most of their time in Code Contracts, assuming that they have responsibilities on other projects as well.
- Dave
http://davesexton.com/blog
