Agreeing with will I would say use something from the workflow engine family although not workflow.
Examine System.Workflow.Activities.Rules Namespace a little bit – it’s supported in .Net 3, and built into .Net3.5. You have everything in hand for free to use like you mentioned :
-
RuleCondition for conditions , RuleAction for actions
-
standardized format for describing
metacode (CodeDom – CodeExpressions) -
you can plugin any kind of complexity
into that (to tell the truth except
Linq and lambdas and so extension
methods of some kind) via
TypeProviders -
there’s a builtin editor for rule
editing with intellisense -
as the rule is serializable it can be
easily persisted - if you meant to use the rules over a
database scheme then via typeprovider
it can be implemented too
For a starter :
Using rules outside of a workflow
Ps.: we’re using it extensively and there’re much more in that namespace than you ever imagine -> a complete meta algorithm language
And the most important : it’s easy to use – really