Methods marked as [TestInitialize] and [TestCleanup] not executed, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting

Make sure they are marked public and not private and then the methods marked with those attributes will execute.

Karma, Angular.JS "Module is not available!" error

I was troubleshooting "Module '{0}' is not available!" error while testing an Angular.js app with karma and it got me puzzled quite a bit. Worst of all -- Google was not helpful (which clearly indicated that the problem is at my end). This url: http://docs.angularjs.org/error/$injector:nomod did not help either. My problem was that I forgot to include my controller js file into the files: [] array in karma configuration. Doh!

Today I learned: Unit testing using Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone has built-in support for Unit Testing. Here is the article on MSDN. Here is how to set it up (quickly). VS has to have at least update 2, and all you need to do is to add another project to your solution, choose "Windows Phone Unit Test App". Then write your unit tests and run them using the "TEST" menu on the top bar.

Now if only they allowed access to visualstudio.com for Windows Phone projects or made VS 2013 for Windows Phone available for download.

Unit testing in Visual Studio 2008

I wanted to try out TDD (Test-Driven Development) for a long time. I checked out NUnit, even got a book on it (read just 1 chapter and got the idea, since then read 3 more chapters :)... Time passed since then and due to some other reasons I haven't touched the subject. Now I have the time and I decided to explore TDD again. This series of posts will describe my experience.

1. Unit testing (why it's here -- below).

When I read about TDD before, I also read about unit testing tools that are in VS 2008, but I did not have a chance to play with them at the time. Now I explored what they are and they aren't quite TDD, they are unit tests. The difference between TDD and unit testing is that in TDD tests drive development -- tests are written before the actual features. Unit testing can happen after a feature is put in. VS2008 even has a nice test generator based on the current code. The time spent exploring unit testing was definitely worth it, but I want to develop something using TDD.

Below is the brief rundown on unit testing. By the way, I found a very good article on unit testing that covers what I am about to describe in greater detail. The only other thing I wish it covered is how to get the code coverage analysis from within VS2008, but I think it's just a matter of pushing a couple of buttons in the IDE. By the way, code coverage was something that made me use unit testing tools in VS2008 in the first place, I wanted to see the lines of code that are tested and those that aren't.

So here it comes:

I have an idea in mind for a simple app. A shopping list -- I want to be able to put in new products in the list and check them off when I have them and mark them for purchase when I am out (note to self -- get eggs!). I decided that that would be a good place to exercise the red-green-refactor metaphor. I fired up VS2008, created a simple web project, and then pushed the magic button to generate another project in the same solution for unit tests. Then I created two simple tests to check the database connectivity (I will list somewhat the same code later so I don't put it in now to not repeat myself) and was happy.

Not for long though -- I put in the test code right inside a class the test project, and I did not use any of the web site's classes for it. I sure was checking the connectivity, but that's just testing.

In order to address that, I created a SimpleDataLayer class in the web site, added a simple method to return a SQL connection and wanted to instantiate it from the test project. I could not. It turns out that I created the site in the regular place where my all projects reside (and I sure did not change it in the VS settings -- TODO!), but the tests project got created under Documents/User/... blah. So I could not add a reference and keep testing. I searched google and found on MSDN an option to create Unit Tests (open up the class, right-click in code, Create Unit Tests) and whoa!!! A class appeared and it sure had a lot of things I did not know about (the article explains it nicely).

As you can see, there is now a "ShoppingListSite.accessor," which in fact, has nothing but a path to the web site and the word "WebSite" in it. It must be just a pointer.






Here is what a test looks like:


What exactly is the "SimpleDataLayer_Accessor"? It turns out that it is sort of a proxy between the private class SimpleDataLayer and the one containing the test methods. An instance of the SimpleDataLayer_Accessor can be referred to in the same way as if it was an instance of a SimpleDataLayer.

Another interesting point is that a test is generated inconclusive by default. I think it's a clever idea when someone is using the automated generation of unit tests against a large project, when such a test is run it'll turn out as neither failed nor passed but rather inconclusive.

That's it for now, I'll keep you posted once I make more progress on it.