Did/do any of the 3rd party companies take up the offer to authenticate/test their software up to Defense levels? It seems like that sort of thing could be a heck of a selling point for a software company to have (just guessing, it would cost a forture obviously)

When you test software for a real-time embedded-system like avionics for an airplane or torpedo, they take safety quite serious and it is a big issue, which proportionally relates to repeatable testing and documentation of such. And all our code was signed off by both the developer and the lead engineer responsible for it, audited by both internal QA and government GAO weenies.

The problem we would run into is using commercially provided compilers was compiler bugs and usage of code libraries in our RTES. There were two lines of thought.

1) Put the vendor compiler company on the hook contractually for authenticating the testing and integrity of their compilers and libraries. Most would only do this for many truckloads of money, in large denominations; or they just laughed at us.

2) Pick a compiler version and stick with it for all your testing, even if new version are available. Upgrading meant re-running all our tests.
Only use the most basic mature compiler libraries i.e. math. Then write much more efficient dedicated code to replace calls to the commercial libraries. If you need a queue, write an efficient custom queue with minimal functions/methods/procedures. The equivalent library generic queue instantiation might be orders of magnitude larger and slower, and contain numerous unused methods which would never be used in our application, but still had to be tested if present. We could often cut the memory and or speed of applications by 25% upwards of 80+%. Plus we now had complete control of the source code. We only had to test what we used, not the entire vendor library. Then test it; and test it; and test it; until you want a new job.

And this is why aerospace projects cost so much (one of the reasons at least). But that’s better than the airplanes falling out of the sky.
Did you know in French, an Airbus avionics s/w bug is pronounced “pilot error”!
In an Arian rocket, the French is “special feature”. In English it translates to “floating point overflow” that should have been caught in testing.

Very cool, thanks.

(you may even be able to promote it to public in your derived class, don’t remember enough C# to weigh in)

-David

Using a Partial Class is something I didn’t think about. I wonder if on your Partial Class declaration if you can use the Conditional attribute to completely not include the partial portion…. I need to try that.

System.Runtime.CompilerServices.InternalsVisibleToAttribute

You could allow your NUNIT dlls access to non-public types using this attribute. Your example probably wouldn’t work though (i.e., making a private field public to your unit tests dll. I think the attribute only applies to entire types).

You could hide NUNIT code in a partial class with #if NUNIT around it, too, if that does anything for ya. Or hide code specific to exposing things to your NUNIT dlls.

Otherwise, I like the ConditionalAttribute idea.