Building Trust in Third-party Components using Component Wrappers in the .NET Frameworks

Mingins, C.A. and Chan, C.Y.

Software purchasers are often provided with very sparse information about how to correctly deploy software components. We describe a novel contract-based approach to building trust in third party components. In contrast to the usual approach where contracts specifying the software semantics are constructed at the time of source code generation, we retrofit existing componentswith Contract wrappers. Sets of client requirements on the component are expressed in terms of software contracts using the Design by Contract� method. The targeted component is then wrapped in this executable specification. Subsequent calls to the component are made via the wrapper. Any client misunderstanding about the component's functionality will be picked up as contract violations. Contract wrappers also serve as the basis for test suites for integrating components into applications, and as documentation for future updates. We demonstrate how such contract wrappers can be constructed and deployed using the cross-language metadata capabilities available in Microsoft's new .NET Framework.

Cite as: Mingins, C.A. and Chan, C.Y. (2002). Building Trust in Third-party Components using Component Wrappers in the .NET Frameworks. In Proc. Fortieth International Conference on Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems (TOOLS Pacific 2002), Sydney, Australia. CRPIT, 10. Noble, J. and Potter, J., Eds. ACS. 153-157.

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