C# is *slowly* turning into Eiffel

When I first read Bertrand Meyer's fabulous tome, Object-oriented Software Development, (2nd edition). in 1997 I guessed that it was ten years ahead of its time.  Seems like I wasn't too far off the mark, with .NET 4 introducing language independent support for Design by Contract, as code contracts, and patching up some of the covariance and contravariance issues of previous versions.

How long it will take for most programmers to use the techniques well is anyone's guess, but having mainstream tools that support these approaches is a good thing.

Non-functional requirements

There's a lot of unglamorous stuff in software that is just "expected", and accounts for some of the project cost that you will miss when imagining two guys in a garage (or cafe) knocking out a quickie project.  Here's a handy list: Non-functional requirements: Minimal checklist.