xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code

malloc(); — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:46:03 GMT

I already had the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code on my Amazon wishlist. But after reading Sam Gentile's xUnit Test Patterns and evolving TDD and test automation post today about the book and its topics I've decided to go ahead and order it now. I still have 3 books that I am currently reading ( 1, 2, 3 ) but this will jump to the front of the line when it arrives.

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Technorati tags: TDD, xUnit, Test Patterns

MbUnit 2.4

malloc(); — Sun, 27 May 2007 00:13:41 GMT

Thanks to Andrew Stopford and everyone else who works on MbUnit development. MbUnit 2.4 was just released.

If you are not unit testing or practicing TDD in your projects, I don't know how you could choose plain old NUnit over MbUnit. If you are using regular NUnit it is very simple to convert your projects MbUnit, they use the same [Test] attribute.

MbUnit has:

Row Testing:

[RowTest]
[Row("Hello")]
[Row("Goodbye")]
public void TestString( string myString )
{
    // do your tests in here...
}

More row testing details here.

Specialized Assertions
Database rollback. The unit testing gods say that there should be absolutly no DB access in unit tests, but there are some times when I cannot avoid it. With the rollback attribute I don't have to worry about cleaning up the database after my test runs
Being able to test private methods. (see Vadim Kreynin's articles here and here). *
Extract Embedded Resources With An Attribute In MbUnit. No more dealing with test file directories or setting the correct path in the [SetUp] methods!
RepeatAttribute. Run a specific test multiple times in a row.
ThreadedRepeatAttribute. Run a specific test on multiple threads.
etc. http://www.mbunit.com/ for all the details.

* I have been using the InternalsVisibleTo assembly attribute to accomplish this for a little while now. It gets the job done nicely and has allowed complete separation of our unit tests into a separate assembly. It does require you to change method signatures to internal instead of private, OO purists might feel dirty doing this. Derik Whittaker had a good example on how the attribute should be used.

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Technorati tags: MbUnit, Unit Testing, TDD, .NET