It seems that the static analyser for use with the .NET 4.0 Code Contracts is only going to be available for Team Suite editions of Visual Studio – this puts it well outside the budget for my team.
Are there any alternatives (open source, free or reasonably priced) which offer similar static analysis for design by contract style code (not necessarily using .net code contracts). I’m guessing the answer will be no as the full worth only comes when the BCL itself has contracts – but are there any which go part of the way?
I’m not sure if that’s what you are looking for, but you may have a look at Frama-C
and its ACSL annotation language for C.
Compared to .NET contracts, ACSL contracts are not executable (it’s impossible to check them with run-time assertions) but are better suited to static analysis (they are more expressive and allow a full specification to be written and statically checked. At least theoretically)