The .NET TDD roundup aggregates information of interest to .NET developers using TDD/BDD. If you have something interesting you have done or have run across, please send me the URL with a brief description via the contact link on my blog.

Test-Driven Development

• Writing Testable Code – Isa Goksu writes about writing testable code.
• Moving to Test-Driven Development and Exploring Language Paradigms – Eric Hagan interviews Michael Feathers.
• The Problem with xUnit – Edward Z. Yang writes about why he believes that xUnit test frameworks lead to more boilerplate code and how to use Haskell to create DSL-like tests with QuickCheck.
• Some Rough Draft TDD Demonstration Videos – Brett Schuchert is doing a series of video on TDD. He already published rough drafts of his videos.

Unit Test Frameworks

NUnit

• NUnit 2.5.5 released – Charlie Poole released version 2.5.5 of NUnit last Friday. It can be downloaded from here.
• NUnit Template for ASP.NET MVC 2 – Markus Ewald ported the MSTest unit test templates for ASP.NET MVC 2 to NUnit. It isn’t ready though: it doesn’t add a reference to the ASP.NET project. Details can be found on the NUnit-Discuss mailing list.

MbUnit

• XML Assertions in MbUnit v3 – Yann Trévin writes about new assertions in the upcoming MbUnit 3.2 which will help with testing XML output.

Technorati Tags TDD

Michael Feathers has already summarized the criteria for unit tests in September 2005:

“A test is not a unit test if:

• It talks to the database
• It communicates across the network
• It touches the file system
• It can’t run at the same time as any of your other unit tests
• You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it.

Tests that do these things aren’t bad. Often they are worth writing, and they can be written in a unit test harness. However, it is important to be able to separate them from true unit tests so that we can keep a set of tests that we can run fast whenever we make our changes.”

Developers often even do not write unit tests! They are writing integration tests instead. Sometimes it takes more than knowing the test attributes of the used unit test framework to write real unit tests!

Technorati Tags TDD, unit-testing

• The description of a Row attribute will be copied to the created test case.

You can download it from the RowTest Extension page.

Technorati Tags NUnit, nunitaddin, rowtest, unit-testing

You can extend Depender by writing your own dependency rules.

Technorati Tags legacy code, TDD, unit-testing

RowTest Extension 1.2.2 is packaged in the NUnit extension assemblies. It’s the first time that an externally developed addin is included in a release of NUnit. You’ll have to change the namespace from NUnitExtension.RowTest to NUnit.Framework.Extensions if you want to port your unit tests from older versions of RowTest Extension.

You can download NUnit 2.4.7 from the NUnit site or from Sourceforge.

Technorati Tags NUnit, rowtest, unit-testing

• null cannot be used as argument on .NET Framework 1.1. A new enum value SpecialValue.Null can be used instead. If the RowTest addin finds this value as argument the value will be translated to null.
• Fixed Bug: Common NUnit attributes like Category, Description etc. don’t work for RowTest methods.

You can download it from the RowTest Extension page.

Technorati Tags NUnit, nunitaddin, rowtest, unit-testing

• Fixed Bug: SetUp and TearDown are not called on the RowTest test suite
• Created new Test project for functional tests and reorganized samples.

You can download it from the RowTest Extension page.

Technorati Tags NUnit, nunitaddin, rowtest, unit-testing

• Added build for .NET Framework 1.1.
• Assemblies are now strongly named.
• Added ExceptionMessage property to RowAttribute. It can be used to specify the message of an expected exception.
• Added TestName property to RowAttribute. It is used to provide a custom name of the test. If TestName is null or empty the method name will be used.
• Fixed Bug: TestFixtureSetUp and TestFixtureTearDown are not called on the RowTest test suite (thanks to Wayne Brantley for reporting the bug and special thanks to Jamie Cansdale for providing a fix
• Fixed Bug: When a TestFixture contains both RowTests and normal unit tests the row tests are not alphabetically ordered.

You can download it from here.

Technorati Tags NUnit, rowtest, unit-testing

Technorati Tags NUnit, rowtest, testdriven.net, unit-testing

• Added ExpectedException property to the [Row] attribute. It can be used to specify which type of exception to expect when the given data is passed to the test.
• The [Row] attribute accepts now null values.
• Removed dependency from assembly NUnitExtension.RowTest.AddIn to NUnitExtension.RowTest.

You can download it from here.

Technorati Tags NUnit, rowtest, unit-testing