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Monday, January 12, 2009 9:26 AM

Test-Driven Properties

Zero-Friction TDD post #10: In principle, defining properties (or fields, for that matter) while TDD'ing should be no different than defining methods . Again, the important part is to stay focused on the test at hand, and not become bogged down by implementation
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Monday, January 05, 2009 9:53 AM

Use The Generate Method Stub Smart Tag To Stay In The Zone

Yet Another Zero-Friction TDD Article (YAZFTA): When writing unit tests in the TDD fashion, it's important to stay in the zone and not get side-tracked by irrelevant issues. You need to avoid what I call mental context switching. Focus on writing the
Posted by ploeh | 4 Comments
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 1:08 PM

Assert Messages Are Not Optional

...and now, in this week's episode of Zero-Friction TDD : Optional Assert messages that aren't optional anyway! Actually, this piece of advice comes almost directly from the xUnit Test Patterns book, so I was in doubt whether I should post it all, but
Posted by ploeh | 3 Comments
Thursday, December 11, 2008 9:55 AM

Why Use AreEqual<T>?

This is a post in my Zero-Friction TDD series. One of my colleagues recently asked my why I prefer Assert.AreEqual<T> over one of the non-generic Assert.AreEqual overloads for primitive types. In most cases, I'm very happy with the C# compiler's
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Monday, December 08, 2008 3:51 PM

3 Is Many

This is an installment in my Zero-Friction TDD series. When I was a kid, my parents taught me that many is any number above three two*; they used the simple counting sequence one, two, many . This little story may make me seem like I was an incredibly
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Monday, December 01, 2008 2:32 PM

testmethod Code Snippet

This is an installment in my Zero-Friction TDD series. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed a certain pattern in my unit test examples (like this one ). This is because I always follow the Four-Phase Test pattern (which is a
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Attachment(s): testmethod.snippet
Friday, November 21, 2008 1:56 PM

Ignore Irrelevant Return Values

This is an installment in my Zero-Friction TDD series. Sometimes, you don't care about the return value from a particular operation. The simplest example is if you want to check that creating a new instance of a specific type will throw an exception if
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Monday, November 17, 2008 1:32 PM

Anonymous Variables

This post is an installment in my series on Zero-Friction TDD . Often when writing a unit test, the SUT 's API will force you to create objects that you really don't care about. As an example, take a look at the signature of this constructor: public Plop(
Posted by ploeh | 4 Comments
Friday, November 14, 2008 10:38 AM

Naming Direct Output Variables

In my series of Zero-Friction TDD tips and tricks, it's time to look at naming Direct Output variables. [ TestMethod ] public void DoStuffWillReturnMessage() { // Fixture setup string expectedResult = "ploeh" ; MyClass sut = new MyClass (); // Exercise
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 13, 2008 12:52 PM

Zero-Friction TDD

Writing good code is difficult. Unit tests are written as code, so a corollary to the first sentence is that writing good unit tests is also difficult. TDD (particularly if you interpret the last D as Design ) carries this challenge in abundance, since
Posted by ploeh | 8 Comments
Friday, April 18, 2008 10:13 AM

Vote For Better TDD Support in Visual Studio 2008

Eric Jorgensen has created a Microsoft Connect item asking for better TDD support in Visual Studio 2008 . If you also miss the green (sometimes red) progress bar and other UI elements of NUnit and similar tools, and think that Visual Studio should have
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 11:13 PM

Automatically Generating LINQ To SQL Models From T-SQL

With LINQ to SQL, a couple of questions quickly arise: Since you can create a data model directly in Visual Studio, where's your authoritative definition of the database? If you generate a data model from your database, how do you maintain the model if
Posted by ploeh | 3 Comments
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Attachment(s): DacIntegrationTestLinqToSql.zip
Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:24 PM

Visual Studio 2008 PowerShell

Ever since I first saw a demo of PowerShell some five years ago, I've been wanting to use it for development work; such as automating code generation or whatever other task for which small scripts are needed. It's such a powerful environment, and I simply
Posted by ploeh | 3 Comments
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Attachment(s): vsvars32.ps1
Saturday, October 06, 2007 9:13 PM

Race Troubleshooting Using The Console Output In VSTS

It must be my week of discovering the obvious . The other day I was troubleshooting a race condition in my code. I had a unit test that faithfully reproduced the error, but just looking at the code involved didn't produce any sudden insights into its
Posted by ploeh | 3 Comments
Friday, August 31, 2007 10:14 AM

Agile Proves Effective Once More

Christian , one of my old (and present) collegues, has just posted about his team's latest accomplishment , shipping six months ahead of time! I'm sure that the team consists of a bunch of very talented people, but I'd also venture a guess that their
Posted by ploeh | 1 Comments
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