Introduction

The process of testing application code has always been a crucial step in software development. Many techniques have been developed over the years to ease this painstaking process and yet most of these tools have reached only a small part of the programming public.

Most programmers debug by just adding some lines of code in the Main function of their class, which becomes polluted by these statements pretty soon. Debugging tools such as watches are rarely used, and if they are, an error has already occured and they are used to find out where the error is raised.

Semantic Debug allows to test if functions work as expected without having to pollute the main function or configuring watches to find out what is going wrong. Semantic Debug works in a way like JavaDoc (or NDoc), with formatted comment tags that define the tests to be performed.

Unlike other tools such as JUnit (or NUnit), Semantic Debug has no influence on the final output of your application (you don't have to add any classes to your project).

Project History

The project started in the summer of 2004 from a feeling of discontent with the current testing systems and debugging tools. Originally, Semantic Debug was meant to be implemented in Java, but the developers encountered such problems with this language that they moved on to C#.

Currently, the project's source code is being translated to this language and we hope it will soon achieve alpha status.