When should I use Debug.Assert()?

Question

I\'ve been a professional software engineer for about a year now, having graduated with a CS degree. I\'ve known about assertions for a while in C++ and C, but had no idea t

Answer 1

FWIW ... I find that my public methods tend to use the if () { throw; } pattern to ensure that the method is being called correctly. My private methods tend to use Debug.Assert().

The idea is that with my private methods, I'm the one under control, so if I start calling one of my own private methods with parameters that are incorrect, then I've broken my own assumption somewhere--I should have never gotten into that state. In production, these private asserts should ideally be unnecessary work since I am supposed to be keeping my internal state valid and consistent. Contrast with parameters given to public methods, which could be called by anyone at runtime: I still need to enforce parameter constraints there by throwing exceptions.

Additionally, my private methods can still throw exceptions if something doesn't work at runtime (network error, data access error, bad data retrieved from a third party service, etc.). My asserts are just there to make sure that I haven't broken my own internal assumptions about the state of the object.