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

I’m writing this post to collect links to interesting resources for creating setups using WiX.

• Windows Installer SDK in the MSDN library
• Windows Installer 4.5 SDK: contains tools like Orca or the Windows Installer documentation as CHM file.
• Windows Installer XML (WiX): a toolset that builds Windows Installer packages from XML source code.
• Understanding Microsoft Installer Logs
• Automated Install Testing – MSI Validation
• Conditional Statement Syntax

For getting started with WiX:

• Authoring your first .wxs file
• Creating a simple setup (using Votive)
• WiX Tutorial (by Gábor DEÁK JAHN)
• From MSI to WiX (by Alex Shevchuk)
• MSI Validation in WiX (by Derek Cicerone)
• Adding and Customizing Dialogs in WiX 3

Technorati Tags msi, setup, windows installer, wix

Adhoc projects

The Console runner accepts more than one test assemblies as command line arguments. If you use the GUI runner you can add test assemblies by using “Project => Add Assembly…”. But the test assembly must be in the same directory as the assembly which has already been loaded, otherwise NUnit can’t find the file and aborts with a FileNotFoundException.

Creating NUnit projects

You can create a new NUnit test project by clicking on “File => New Project…”. You can add assemblies to the project by clicking on “Project => Add Assembly…”. Using NUnit test projects the test assemblies can be in different directories.

One configuration file for all test assemblies

NUnit can load configuration files for test assemblies even for class libraries. With NUnit test projects you can use just one configuration file. You can change the name of this file in the NUnit project editor, but you can’t specify a file path, just the file name. The configuration file must be located in the same directory as the project file.

In ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 ComponentController has been removed and the method RenderComponent which called the ComponentController action from the view has been replaced by the method RenderAction which can call an action of a normal Controller. Since this concept conflicts with “Separation of concerns“, Microsoft doesn’t intend to include this feature in the RTM version of ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC Futures

Therefore the ASP.NET MVC team moved the RenderAction method to the ASP.NET MVC Futures which consist of the assembly Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll. This assembly contains features and prototypes which haven’t been included in the RTM version yet. The release for ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 can be downloaded from Codeplex.

In order to use ASP.NET MVC Futures in your MVC project reference the assembly “Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll” and insert the following line into the web.config to include the namespace “Microsoft.Web.Mvc” in all your views automatically:

SubControllers from MvcContrib

SubControllers can be used for similar purposes like RenderAction or Components. Matt Hinze presented this feature from the MvcContrib project in a blog post. SubController actions can be included in the view data as delegates. The views can then invoke these delegates and start the rendering of the SubController action view.

The host controller can pass objects to the SubController. Matt Hinze explains this feature in another blog post.

Technorati Tags asp.net mvc, mvc, mvccontrib

• 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

Launchpad is a free software hosting and development site. Another well-known site of this category is Sourceforge. Launchpad was originally created for Ubuntu and is now used by many other open source projects, e.g. Zope and Silva CMS.

Erik Thomson wrote some tips about using Launchpad and Bazaar on Windows and made a video tutorial.

When I tried to make a first branch at Launchpad on Windows I had some problems, though. I got errors like “bzr: ERROR: Don’t know how to handle SSH connections. Please set BZR_SSH environment variable.” or “bzr: ERROR: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified”. To push changes from the local branch to Launchpad Bazaar needs the python library paramiko for SSH connections and it were missing on my system. Paramiko requires pycrypto, binaries for Windows can be found at The Voidspace Python Modules. To install paramiko install pycrypto first, extract the downloaded zip package, change to the directory and call “&path to python&\python setup.py install”.

After installing the missing libraries everything worked fine and you can find a branch for the RowTest extension for NUnit at Launchpad.

Technorati Tags Bazaar, launchpad