Chris May

I have been looking around for a quick easy load testing package.  Right now I'm trying out OpenSTA.  I can't say that it has been very direct, but I am still holding out hope that it will work.

This is the Getting Started Guide that I have been using.

NAnt is a tool that can help you build your .net applications. 

You can get really detailed with it, but what if you just want to set it up to quickly build projects/solutions or run automated builds.  This is especially useful if you are rebuilding 1 project that you are in the process of testing so you don't have to wait for VS to figure out if any of the referenced projects need to be rebuilt.

Well, with a few quick steps you can have this.

After downloading NAnt you need to create a little batch file somewhere in your PATH (for example, c:\windows).  Name the file nant.bat and put this in it:

@echo off
"C:\apps\nant\nant-0.86-beta1\bin\NAnt.exe" %*

You will obviously want to replace my path with your own path to your nant exe that you downloaded.

Then add an entry to your PATH system variable to the directory that contains devenv.com.  For me this path is:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\ide\

Then you just need to add a .build file to your project.  I name it the same as my project name but you can do whatever you want.

This build file should contain the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="ProjName" default="build" basedir=".">
  <target name="build">
    <exec failonerror="true" program="devenv.com" commandline="ProjName.vbproj /build Debug" />
  </target>
</project>

Rename ProjName as needed in this file as well.

Then all you need to do is navigate to the folder that contains the .build file from a command line and run:

nant

It will scan for the build file, and use devenv.com to build it.

You can also use this to build solutions, just change the .vbproj file to a .sln file.

I am always on the lookout for better and easier ways to automate testing of my applications.  Mostly, this stems from my teams not being too keen on implementing testing, so the easier I can make it, the easier it will be to convince others to write tests.

So Phil Haack has suggested a free framework called WebAii, and after taking a quick look, it looks promising.

It supports some nice features like mouse/keyboard actions for Ajax testing, and dom actions (find an element and click it, or whatever).  It also supports unit testing your javascript functions by having your test call the functions.  It also integrates with Nunit.  Nice!

Hopefully I can find some free time (HAHAHHAAH) when I can test this out more in a project.

 

I came across this CodePlex project called Plasma which is supposed to aid in testing web apps with standard unit test frameworks.

I couldn't find much info on their codeplex site, but I will be keeping track of it to see if I can find some info.

I linked to this article in my last post, but here are 2 from Roy that are really about HOW to write code that is testable.

Tips for Testable code and for testing legacy code

Achieving And Recognizing Testable Software Designs – Part I

As someone who is trying to jump into the unit testing world, one of the major problems I had was deciding on using NUnit (which everyone uses) or use MSTest(built in).

I didn't want to jump into this and realize 500 hours later that I picked the wrong framework.  Well, now it seems I don't have to worry about that as much. 

First I was reading this article by Roy Osherove, and somehow I ended up on this page talking about converting between NUnit and VSTS projects, and from there I found a link to this page, which contained this great piece of code:

#If NUNIT Then
Imports NUnit.Framework
Imports TestClass = NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute
Imports TestMethod = NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute
Imports TestInitialize = NUnit.Framework.SetUpAttribute
Imports TestCleanup = NUnit.Framework.TearDownAttribute
#Else
Imports Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting
#End If

This allows you do have the came code for NUnit and MSTest.  Just change the NUNIT variable and recompile.

The other thing you need to do is use <TestAttribute()> instead of <Test()> on your NUnit tests, but I don't see the difference there.

 

Over at TheServerSide they had a nice writeup of an example of how to use NUnitASP to test the UI of some pages.

I am not sure how valuable this would be to invest my time in, espically as it seems that there is now way to test repeaters or gridviews (there is a datagridtester however).

I will have to look some more and see if ther eis a way to do this.

This is awesome!

Wikipedia has a whole list of programming anti-patterns, and James Carr lists some TDD anti-patterns.

Some of these are pretty funny:

Magic numbers: Including unexplained numbers in algorithms

Superboolean logic: unnecessary comparison or abstraction of boolean arithmetic

Boat anchor: Retaining a part of a system that no longer has any use

Roy Osherove blogs that he was mistaken when he suggesting using mocks for data access code.  With the improved Rollback attributes that he helped create, along with people like Justin Burtch who created a similar attribute for VSTS, they are now thinking that this is the way to go: rolling back database changes.

Roy is no fan of VSTS testing, finding a few bugs and some questionable design decisions.  Those don't seem like deal breakers for me, but we will see.

Rhino Mocks seems to be one of the most preferred mock frameworks out there.

Phil Haack, CodeBetter and Markitup have article showing how to test events on interfaces (x2) and objects in Rhino Mocks respectively.

They even have some videos up showing some Rhino Mocks stuff.

Haack also has a nice example of using MVP and Rhino Mocks to test some asp.net pages.

Update: Phil Haack has updated his HttpContext Simulator with some new goodies.

Here is an article by Haacked showing how one can create a test friendly httpcontext.

I modified his example some and started using it in some tests; works very nice!

Here is another implementation based on Haack's example that is supposed to also work with session.

I almost NEVER use session if I can avoid it, but still this could come in handy.

There is virtually no information on the internet about how to use these tests.

This is one of the vew pages that actually shows a working example.

This discussion group seems to be mostly dealing with standard unit tests, and winform unit testing.

 

I am already using Enterprise Service Transactions in an app that I wrote to automate the generation of invoices at Walsh.

This same technique is an option (I have probably blogged about it before, but this is a nice article) for rolling back DB changes.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/articles/dbunittesting.aspx

 

NUnit is good, but I think something that is more focused on Acceptance Testing or Functional Testing would be better suited.

TestComplete and to a possibly lesser extent, WebKing seem to focus on these more.

In addition, I might be able to use the MS ACT for this.
This guy thinks that FIT(.net version?) and the FitNesse framework are the ways to go.

Microsoft has it's own Testing Patterns and Practices section.

If all else fails... here are tons of links about functional testing.

NUnit is supposed to help with TDD and writing test scripts. I also found a link to ASP.NET addin which I guess I'll need for working with ASP.NET.(?)

Here is another MSDN article... but there is a newer on in the lastest MSDN magazine... but I guess that isn't online.