http://altnetpodcast.com/

One of the features that Igor Abade showed us was the Test Unit. It immediately became clear to me how this could be applied in my work environment and how it could eventually become a common practice in my company. Important features could have test units associated and prevent a meltdown when another feature is added or modified.

Check out the step-by-step guide after the break! 

Now the first thing to realize about this feature, is that it’s not available with all versions of visual studio. In fact, it is only available for the Team System version which is the more complete. There are several debates and even a petition about whether or not Microsoft should include unit testing in all versions of visual studio. I will let you follow the links and make up your own mind.

In order to further understand the use of unit testing, I will – as I did in my other howto blog post- describe a brief problem and follow with a howto of how I solved the problem using unit testing.

Problem:

The following code illustrates a simple Account class in C# that follow these simple rules to calculate the account’s credit:

• If the balance of the account is smaller than or equal to $2,000 , the owner of the account will receive an immediate approval of 10% of it’s balance.
• If the balance is greater than $2,000 , the account’s owner will receive 20% if the balance.
• Additionally, if the owner has a premium account, he’ll receive $1,000 of extra credit.

A simple C# function to calculate immediate Credit approval for a given account.

A wizard will pop up in which you select exactly what you want to test. In the combobox below you can select in what .net language you wish the test to be in.

Select the name of the project.

If you've chosen a shared type, you'll be asked if you want to add the InternalsVisibleTrue attribute. If you don't you'll get compilation errors, so click YES.

Scroll down to the end of the Test file that automatically is set on your VS. Here you'll see a few lines of code marked with TODO. These are the lines of code you'll modify to create the test.

Modify the value of the parameters with the desired input, and set the desired output in the expected variable.

In my case, I have commented the last line of code. It can be use if you want to test for an inconclusive situation. In our case, we're going to pretend it's conclusive.

Last but not least, run the test and check if it passes. Try modifying the code and see what happens.

This is a quick post just to emphasize a cool blog that I’ve come across this week. Sara Ford’s blog is about cool features and tweaks to Visual Studio to make it work for you. I’ve included it in my RSS reader and will most definitely be keeping an eye on it.

That’s it for now.

Please comment if you feel inclined.

The discovery of custom templates was a pleasant surprise and further harnessed my curiosity in the other features in this IDE that I was missing out on. 

For now, however, let’s stick to the Templates and how they might help you make Visual Studio a more friendly environment. 

To understand the benefit we first have to understand the problem.

Problem: Inserting a new project into a solution or a new item into a project may result in a series of repeated tasks that are time consuming and tedious. Sometimes the issue is even greater than the time taken but the lack of automation may result in items and projects with different configurations and a lack of standard.

Real-Life Situation: In my workplace, we have two customized windows forms called RecordBase and FormBase. Virtually every window in our solutions inherit from these two winforms. As simple as it may seem to go into the Designer file and changing the Inherits statement, some people believe very strongly that you shouldn’t mess with the designer file and end up commenting the Inherits in that file and including the Inherits statement in the VB file.

Creating a template is as easy as doing what you’ve done a thousand times -inserting a project or an item and customizing it to your needs- and following a wizard.

So, to create a template for the afore mentioned real-life situation you would do the following:

1. Insert the item to the project and customize it as you would. In my case, switch the inherits in the designer file to a custom inherits.

2. Go to File – > Export Template

Choose the type of template you want to create and from which project.

3.   

If you've chosen an Item Template, you'll select the item that you want to create a template for in this screen.

If you've chosen the Item Template, you can choose references that need to be included whenever this specific Item is inserted.

Last but not least, you'll include a name for the template, an Icon and a simple description.

This is my first post and as I don’t like being clichée, I’ll not bore you with a “Hello, world” title. Instead, I’ll give you some two interesting blogs that keep my software developer neurons happy whenever there’s a new post. Please feel free to post in the comment section your own blog or any interesting blogs that you follow. 

Is This Thing On?  : A great .NET blog by a Microsoft insider.

Coding Horror : Not really a .NET or SQL Server blog but a more general blog that every developer should read for the curious insights.