private override

static reflection – Method Guards

Another bit of magic with static reflection. Refer to my last post for a little more explanation of static reflection, and a sweet implementation (IMO) of INotifyPropertyChanged using static reflection.

In the past several years, on several projects, I've seen many lines of code at the beginning of public interface methods that look like:

    public class WebServer
    {
        public void BootstrapServer(int port, string rootDirectory, string serverName)
        {
            if( rootDirectory == null )
            {
                throw new ArgumentNullException( "rootDirectory" );
            }
            if( serverName == null )
            {
                throw new ArgumentNullException( "serverName" );
            }

            // Bootstrap the server
        }
    }

I realize the need, since we don't have real DbC in .NET (yet), but I REALLY dislike this and feel it to be a pretty bad smell.  It feels unDRY, obscures essence, and I just plain don't like it.

So, here is an implementation that makes it tolerable, if not enjoyable (because of the coolness of using static reflection), because I think it actually adds to the essence and overall readability of a given method.

This is what the above code can now look like:

    public class WebServer
    {
        public void BootstrapServer( int port, string rootDirectory, string serverName )
        {
            Guard.IsNotNull( () => rootDirectory );
            Guard.IsNotNull( () => serverName );

            // Bootstrap the server
        }
    }

And here is the implementation:

    public static class Guard
    {
        public static void IsNotNull<T>(Expression<Func<T>> expr)
        {
            // expression value != default of T
            if (!expr.Compile()().Equals(default(T)))
                return;

            var param = (MemberExpression) expr.Body;
            throw new ArgumentNullException(param.Member.Name);
        }
    }

Lovin it!  Hope you do too.

static reflection – INotifyPropertyChanged