I've recently done work at a company where there are no automated tests, and tests aren't part of the culture. I've been writing tests for so long now that it's jarring to consider working without them, so I've gone ahead and written tests for my part of the work. As I've done so it's really brought home the advantages of writing tests, and I wanted to list them out.

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I recently reused my generic, disposable WCF service client, and made some changes to make it simpler to use and easier to unit test. Here's what I did.

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In my most recent project we had to support classes with fairly deep object graphs where any of the nodes could validly be null. We didn't want to have lots of 'if not null' checks everywhere, so I wrote an extension method which takes an expression of any length and returns the expression value or a default value if any of the nodes are null. Here's the extension method code, along with an overview of how it works.

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WatiN lets you attach to browser windows so you can verify their contents and close them as part of your tests, but the standard API doesn't detect windows with PDF documents in them. Here's an extension method which does.

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WatiN's DomContainer.WaitForComplete() method pauses test execution until the DOM has finished loading, but if your page has functions registered with JQuery's ready() function, you'll probably want to wait for those to finish executing before testing it. Here's a WatiN extension method which pauses test execution until that happens.

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NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial, and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why.

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I've been doing a fair amount of UI testing using WatiN recently – here’s some extension methods I've found useful.

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For the last two years, I’ve ordered the Nimble Pros Software Craftsmanship calendars, which use ‘motivational poster’ style pictures to depict various software practices and principles worth keeping in mind. Here’s one of the walls at work, where I’ve got the calendars cut up and displayed for easy reference: I like being able to point to a principle when its use pops up, and they provide a nice illustration of things everyone should be aware of. I’ll be following this up with a post on each month’s ......

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Having written an extension method to create an instance from a Type and been a bit underwhelmed by its performance, I looked into exactly what was happening and have now got it working much, much faster. Here's how.

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I'm currently reading Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by 'Uncle Bob' Martin, which includes a section on writing readable unit tests. I've had an article about using Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to write readable unit tests in the works for a while now, and was inspired to finish it off using a 'clean' unit test from the book.

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