c# - Validate assemblies and namespaces in VAB config file

Question

We are using version 4.1 of the validation application block. I am relatively new to it so I was wondering if it had the ability to either abstract out the configured namespaces and assemblies or otherwise provide proper validation of their existence?

We had an issue recently where someone moved a class and didn't update the validation configuration file with the new namespace. As a result the validations were no longer being applied to the object. The application block seems to just ignore the discrepancies. Unfortunately this was not caught during the normal QA cycle. Is there any built in way to protect ourselves from this type of change in the future? What I did in the interim is load up the config xml, extract out all the assemblies and defined namespaces and validate that they all exist.

Answer 1

One of possible solutions that comes to me is using of AOP programming concepts. In short, for example in your case, you mark the "fragile" code with some attibute and at compile time check if the type, member function, property... is in a state you intendt it ti be in.

Like a references:

CSharpCornerArticle-2009 (old but still good one)

PostSharp (may be the best tool on the market now for AOP)

Rolsyn (compiler as a Service provided by MS. You can write your own small parser of C# or VB.NET code and inject it inside you CI environment.

Hope this helps.