2026-08-12 - 1 - ProForma - Guards

Hello I'm Marlene and I invite you to follow my journey developing ProForma.net. But since this is my first post about ProForma, I will give you an overview of what I'm trying to achieve. What ProForma.net is planned to be The main Goal is to develop an application shell for schema based Applications. You will have mainly to different types of UI schemes, first for the Window Layout, there you will tell which elements are contained in the different application sections, like what Buttons or Menus you will have in the window title bar, or what sidebar tabs you will provide for the Ribbons, what the content area is filled with (spoiler I'm going to use flexlayout-react https://github.com/caplin/FlexLayout ). As host application I will write a C# application using the WebView2 abstraction library Photino ( https://www.tryphotino.io/ ). What you can expect In this dev diary series I'll show what I was working on, I'll show you some code and will explain why did to choose the way I did it, or will share some thoughts about the project or the architecture. I also will show you how to write plugins for ProForma, because I plan to handle everything as a plugin so you can change the most aspects of the app. The journey begins: overcome the guard Ok, most of you will know it... parameter checking on top of a method... nearly endless 'if throw' constructs... they are ugly... if (! Directory . Exists ( physicalPath )) throw new DirectoryNotFoundException ( $"Could not find the given path ' { physicalPath } '." ); if ( _directories . ContainsKey ( urlPrefix )) throw new Exception ( $"Key ' { urlPrefix } ' already exists." ); if ( _directories . ContainsValue ( physicalPath )) throw new Exception ( $"Physical Path ' { physicalPath } ' already exists." ); I mean who wants to read that? I don't. So I wanted guards, and I've could used some 3rd Party library, but instead I came up with my own solution for the Guards, since I don't always want to throw the exception on a failed asser