September 13, 2009
Microsoft Dev Labs has released a new version of Code Contracts. (For more information about Code Contracts in the .NET Framework 4.0, see System.Diagnostics.Contracts and this article). If you haven't yet, I highly recommend installing the latest Code Contracts release. If you're using Visual Studio 2008 then you'll also get a shiny new tab in your project's Properties window.
Figure 1: Code Contracts tab in Visual Studio 2008 project Properties window
Along with the latest features is a new tool that adds documentation for Code Contracts to an assembly's XML documentation file. The latest release also includes a Sandcastle patch that allows the vs2005 style to include the code contract documentation within an expandable Contracts section, as shown in the following screenshot.
Figure 2: Example Sandcastle output with Contracts section
The following blog post describes how you can patch Sandcastle so that it uses Code Contracts in XML documentation files. The author chose to use DocProject to automate the build process, but I suspect that it will work with or without any automation tools for Sandcastle.
http://www.leading-edge-dev.de/?p=447
Note that I've tested this procedure with success in Visual Studio 2008 standard edition.
Just don't forget to create a new DocProject or DocSite project after applying the Sandcastle patch. You can use the Import Topics and Settings step in the New Project Wizard to copy over the important stuff from an existing project if you'd like.
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On a side note, I think this also about ruins my ContractN project ;). I've abandoned it anyway, so I'll be doing the honorable thing and will close down the ContractN project on CodePlex at some point (to help keep CodePlex clean - just doin' my part). I'll continue to host the code on my blog in case anybody's interested in learning how to use Context-Bound Objects, in some form or another.