Mocking is an important aspect of writing unit tests. The current project that I am on does a lot of integration testing, but not much unit testing. I'm trying to increase the amount of true unit tests, but struggle to do so due to the difficulty in mocking subroutines.

The team that I am on had selected Moq as the mocking framework of choice prior to my arrival, however there aren't actually any tests using it. As long as I am mocking functions on an interface, Moq is an acceptable framework, however subroutines are completely unmockable. I have done a fair amount of googling, and there seems to be quite a few questions on Stackoverflow about it, but no real answers.

In this particular case, what I want to do with mocking is ensure that the proper subroutine is called when I pass in an object that matches certain criteria. I am able to get it to work with Rhino Mocks by doing the following:

     _

    Public Sub SaveProposal_WhenProposalIsNew_CallCreate()

        Dim proposal = New Proposal("title", "description")

        Dim dataProvider = MockRepository.GenerateMock(Of IProposalDataProvider)()

        dataProvider.Expect(Function(dp) CreateProposal(dp)).IgnoreArguments()

        Dim service = New ProposalService(dataProvider, TestAppContext.Current)

        service.SaveProposal(proposal)

        dataProvider.VerifyAllExpectations()

    End Sub

    Private Function CreateProposal(ByVal dp As IProposalDataProvider)

        dp.CreateProposal(Nothing)

        Return Nothing

    End Function

However, when I try something similar with Moq using the code below:

     _

    Public Sub SaveProposal_WhenProposalIsNew_CallCreate()

        Dim proposal = New Proposal("title", "description")

        Dim dataProvider = New Mock(Of IProposalDataProvider)()

        dataProvider.Setup(Function(dp As IProposalDataProvider) CreateProposal(dp))

        Dim service = New ProposalService(dataProvider.Object, TestAppContext.Current)

        service.SaveProposal(proposal)

        dataProvider.VerifyAll()

    End Sub

    Private Function CreateProposal(ByVal dp As IProposalDataProvider)

        dp.CreateProposal(It.IsAny(Of ProposalDto))

        Return Nothing

    End Function

I get the following exception:

Any mock-magicians out there know the answer? The problem stems from the inability of VB to create an Expression(Of Action(Of Something)) because lambdas must return a value. The universe plans on correcting itself with the release of VB10, by allowing Sub() lambdas, but I can't wait that long.

I have started to explore Google's new Buzz social enhancement to GMail. I don't consider this a twitter killer, but each system has pros and cons. I wanted to briefly put down some of my thoughts, and maybe get some feedback as well.

I Suck at 140 Characters

The Conversation is in your Face

Privacy

Summary

Anyone else have any thoughts on Buzz? I think Google needs to put out an API sooner rather than later, as I can see tools like TweetDeck and Digsby integrating with Buzz, and adding value. The rollout is still in progress, but I'm curious to see what happens after the curiousity subsides.

File this under things I probably should have known by now.

Whenever I have needed to edit a visual studio project file's XML, I have used an external XML/text editor. All my attempts to edit with Visual Studio resulted in the entire project being loaded, not the xml contents. So, here's the trick. First right-click on the project file in the solution explorer and select 'Unload Project'. This option will only show up if your project is a part of a solution. Once the project has been unloaded, right-click again and select the 'Edit [your project file name]' command and this will bring up the XML editor with the contents of your project file. Once the changes have been made, right-click on the project again and select 'Reload Project' to bring the project back into the solution.

File this under things I probably should have known by now.

If you have gone through all the trouble of marking up all of your classes and methods with XML documentation so everyone who consumes your API has helpful summary and description information, make sure you deploy the .xml file with your compiled library. The documentation information is not embedded in the binary. I knew that the xml was required to generate documentation help files, I did not know that Visual Studio also required them for populating documentation in intellisense and the Object Browser.

I read some code the other day that made me do a double take.

    if(businessObject.Id.Equals(new Guid()))

    {

        // create object in db

    }

The first thing I thought was "Is this even possible? Will this code ever run?" But it will, and it does, because the default constructor on a Guid returns Guid.Empty. And while this is counter intuitive, it is the expected behavior of a default constructor on a value type.

The C# spec says that a default constructor is implicitly provided and cannot be overridden. And the behavior is to give a value produced by a bit pattern of all zeros. So this isn't a problem with the behavior of Guid, it's a problem with the behavior of the developer. Comparing to Guid.Empty is much more intuitive in terms of expected behavior.

    if (businessObject.Id.Equals(Guid.Empty))

    {

        // create object in db

    }

Please think about the poor souls who have to read your code after you are done creating it.