I am starting a maintenance project where I need to work with legacy code and also create new ones. New ones I can create proper interface based development and I can use Moq to do proper unit testing. I can't use Moq against the legacy code since they do not have proper coding to mock out the objects. Based on the reading, Typemock looks like an excellent fit since I can isolate the object and return what we want when a method is called on legacy objects. I really like the simplicity and ease of development. I would like to know is there any other tools out there like Typemock I should look at before committing to it since I have to pay for it.
Thanks
PS: ours is Microsoft shop we work with C#/ASP/ASp.Net/Silverlight and VB.Net
** I just found that Infragistics have one mocking tool as well.
What you're looking for is a mocking framework that uses the Profiler API. These are the ones that can "mock anything" because they sort of run "underneath" the code being tested.
When considering one of these, you'll want to think about things like:
Integration support: Does it work with the tools you're using? For example, your build server, coverage tool, unit testing tool, etc. Are there any additional tools it comes with (e.g., Visual Studio plugins) that might help you work with it?
Technical support: If something goes wrong or you find a bug in the product, can you ask someone about it?
Syntax/patterns: Does it support AAA testing or is it only record/replay? How easy is it to start working with?
Community and learning resources: How's the documentation? Are there people out there who can answer your more general usage questions or are you "on your own?"
There are three primary mocking frameworks to consider that I'm aware of:
Typemock Isolator - The most mature with a free license for open source projects, but otherwise not free.
Telerik JustMock - New to the scene, but good features. There is a free/limited version.
Moles - Free from Microsoft, though somewhat less easy to integrate with tools outside the VSTS realm.
Full disclosure: I'm a Typemock MVP and I've been using Isolator for a while. It has thus far been worth its weight in gold, particularly in Brownfield development. I will admit in some cases, where it's more Greenfield, I use Rhino or Moq. It really depends on what I'm doing.
In any case, I recommend evaluating each of the tools yourself to see which works best in your environment. Be sure to see how it integrates, how easy it is to get going, etc. for each one, and then make your decision based on your experience in your setting.
Related
I want to create a smart and easy way to produce and generate code automatically.
It's not easy to explain, but what I want to do is something like what codefluent software (http://www.softfluent.com/) does. So design graphically a model and what is generated is a collection of classes in according with some rules defined for my context. Otherwise, also a tool like Telerik which is integrate in Visual Studio and through a custom menu it's possible to manage particular behaviours of the application.
I know that my request is not clear and so general, but also my acutal ideas are in an embrional state. I see that Visual Studio support a DSL SDK (vsvmsdk) which permits to specify and design an own language. But I can't understand if it is exactly what I need.
Anyone can suggest me a different tool or maybe a documentation about what I can do in Visual Studio to reach my goal?
CodeFluent Entities is a custom-made tool, it's not relying on any 3rd party software. The graphical surface is using WPF with special algorithms and specific lightweight treeviews. (disclaimer: I work for this company, and I helped develop that software).
That being said, if you want to quickly develop something, you could indeed start with the http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsvmsdk you mention (VSVMSDK is the successor of the DSL SDK, aka 'DSL Tools'). It has the big advantage of being free. Note however the future of this component at Microsoft is unclear, as they seem to prefer 'Code-first' over 'Model-first' now.
I am new to unit-tests. I am about to start working on a big project using C#, VS2010. I was wondering if its a good idea to use test-framework that comes with VS2010, or should I look for third party frameworks.
Thanks
If the reset of the organization you're in is using MSTest, that's a good reason to use it. If you are doing this on your own, that reasoning is irrelevant.
For third-party frameworks, nUnit works well with VS2010, and it's easy to find information on how to use it. It's the only one I've used, since my previous employer didn't pony up for the MS Test licensing.
The key to using unit test frameworks is learning how to write good tests, not necessarily what tool you use.
For a good overview that uses .NET, I'd recommend Roy Osherove's book, http://www.manning.com/osherove/
Good luck!
I'm looking for feedback from .Net developers who have experience with Aldon as a lifecycle management platform. We're seriously considering using Aldon for lifecycle management including source control, automated builds, etc. I know there are a lot of other options out there, but ours is primary an AS/400 shop (with AS/400 programmers outnumbering .Net developers 6 to 1), and Aldon is used already by our iSeries team. The benefit we're looking for is having one lifecycle management suite.
Basically, I'm looking for opinions from people who have used Aldon and another set of tools (perhaps TFS, or a combination of SVN, Cruise Control, etc). If you've worked with both, do you have a recommendation on whether this is a good idea, or a bad idea? It's obviously a big choice, so any feedback would be helpful.
Edit - Added
No answers or comments... AND my first Tumbleweed badge. I'm not sure if this is just a bad question, if nobody actually USES Aldon to manage their .NET work, or if there's just nobody using Aldon that used other products and can offer a comparison.
So, I'm offering a bounty to sweeten the deal, and broadening the scope of the question... If there are any people out there USING Aldon at all, can you provide any information on issues you have had, is it a good suite of tools, frustrations, or gotchas, things you love, etc?
Added -even more
Our primary goal is to have one product to manage both our .NET and our AS/400 (primarily RPG) development. If you have a suggestion for a different suite of tools, or have tried it and decided it isn't worth it, I'll take that answer as well.
I'm working in a shop similar to yours--in our case, there is a substantial legacy code base of iSeries COBOL code, and a growing number of .NET systems--and the .NET developers have successfully lobbied to use Subversion for source control. In my admittedly brief time evaluating the product, it seemed like Aldon was not very flexible at all in areas like branching and tagging, and has a very cumbersome and arcane interface. Since product lifecycles are (mis)managed separately in our shop anyway, limiting the .NET use of Aldon to source control only, it was a simple decision. In the .NET world, Aldon lags far behind the standard open source tools in features and usability, and has no hope of competing with TFS. In our case, managing .NET code outside of Aldon has definitely increased developer productivity and decreased frustration.
One example...coming from a Subversion shop, I was trying to find out how to create an experimental branch in Aldon. If it is possible at all, the documentation did a great job of obscuring the feature, and our Aldon admin had never come across the concept. Everything in our shop is locked down tight, with admin rights needed to create projects, versions, etc. This might be worthwhile from a lifecycle management standpoint, but from the perspective of a developer trying to get work done, it is a killer. I don't think lifecycle management and source control belong in the same software, and Aldon has done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
I think you will find nobody here uses it. .NET people fall into two categories - those that are "cheap" (i.e. trying to save costs) and then basically you look or something like open source. And those who pay a lot, and most of those go with Team System - because it is ingtegrated into Visual Studio from the bottom up. AS/400 is a pretty rare intermix for .NET developers, so, at the end - you possibly are just out of luck.
I Personally am not sure I would even bother with it. THere is a lot more to soemthing like Team System than tracking source etc. - lots of good testing features, build in continuous integration etc., and all that without running through hoods in order to - well - get then an inferior product.
We encountered the same problem at my workplace a few years back when we started up our first .NET project in the midst of a bunch of RPG developers. At the time, we chose to use a separate source control system (Subversion) for anything written in .NET (or for anything else that somebody wanted to use it for). We moved all of our projects (.NET and AS/400) into Gemini for time and defect tracking purposes. Basically, we chose a single product to manage our .NET and AS/400 projects at a high level but different tools for version control, automated builds, automated testing, etc.
Years later I can happily say that this has worked out quite well for us. I really can't think of any issues this has caused - but can attest to the fact that it has avoided some potential headaches and butting of heads. I do think that you will have an easier time finding (good) .NET developers by choosing a widely used version control system. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me the use of a version control system I have never even heard of would be a bit of a red flag in an interview situation.
Microsoft has recently put a release of their Code Contracts framework on DevLabs with a commercial license. We're interested on using them in our project (mostly C#, some C++/CLI) to gradually replace all the custom validation code, but I'm keen to know about the experience other people have had with it before we commit to it, specifically:
Do you think the framework is sufficiently mature for large and complex commercial projects?
What problems have you run into while using it?
What benefits have you got from it?
Is it currently more pain than it's worth?
I realise that this is a somewhat subjective question as it requires opinion, but given that this framework is a very significant part of .NET 4.0 and will (potentially) change the way we all write validation code, I hope that this question will be left open to gather experience on the subject to help me make a decision to a specific, answerable question:
Should we be starting to use it next month?
Note that we do not ship a code API, only a web service one, so for the majority of code breaking compatibility in terms of the exception type thrown is not a concern. However, as I'm hoping more people than just me will benefit from this post and its answers, any detail around this area is more than welcome.
The last mature response to this was in 2009, and .NET 4 is out. I figure we're due for an update:
Code Contracts might well be mature enough for your Debug releases.
I realise this is somewhat of an upgrade from “Harmless” to “Mostly Harmless”.
The Code Contracts home page links to quite thorough documentation in PDF format. The documentation outlines usage guidelines in section 5. To summarize, you can pick how brave you feel about the Contract Tools re-writing your IL in your Release builds.
We're using the “don't rewrite my Release IL” mode.
So far, I'm most enjoying this unexpected benefit: there's less code, thus less code to test. All your guard clauses melt away.
if(arg != null) {
throw new ArgumentNullException("arg");
}
// Blank line here insisted upon by StyleCop
becomes:
Contract.Requires(arg != null);
Your functions are shorter. Your intent is clearer. And, you no longer have to write a test named ArgumentShouldNotBeNull just to reach 100% coverage.
So far, I've run into two problems:
I had a unit test which relied on a contract failure to succeed. You might argue the existence of the test was a blunder, but I wanted to document this particular prohibition in the form of a test. The test failed on my build server because I didn't have the tools installed. Solution: install the tools.
We're using two tools that rewrite IL: Code Contracts and PostSharp. They didn't get along too well. PostSharp's 2.0.8.1283 fixed the problem. I'd cautiously evaluate how any two IL-rewriting tools get along, though.
So far, the benefits are outweighing the hazards.
Addressing out-of-date concerns raised in other answers:
Code Contracts's documentation is quite thorough, though regrettably in PDF.
There's at least one Code Contract forum hosted by Microsoft.
Code Contracts Standard Edition is free if you have any VS2010 license.
.NET 4 is out. I've run into Microsoft's contracts when implementing generic collection interfaces.
I've been playing around with the code contracts some more myself on a small but moderately complex standalone project, which needs to inherit from some BCL classes and use other ones.
The contracts thing seems great when you're working in a completely isolated environment with just your own code and primitive types, but as soon as you start using BCL classes (which until .NET 4.0 do not have their own contracts) the verifier cannot check whether they will violate any of the requires/ensures/invariants and so you get a lot of warnings about potentially unsatisfied constraints.
On the other hand, it does find some invalid or potentially unsatisfied constraints which could be real bugs. But it's very hard to find these because there is so much noise that it's hard to find out which ones you can fix. It's possible to suppress the warnings from the BCL classes by using the assume mechanism, but this is somewhat self-defeating as these classes will have contracts in the future and assumptions will lessen their worth.
So my feeling is that for now, because in 3.5 we're trying to build on a framework that the verifier does not sufficiently understand, that it's probably worth waiting for 4.0.
Judging by this thread I would say it is not quite mature enough to use for an enterprise level project. I haven't used it myself, but people are still running into bugs that would bring your contract-critical project to a halt. It seems like a really great framework and the example videos they've provided have been exciting, but I'd wait for:
Existence of a community forum. You're going to want to be able to discuss inevitable problems you run into with other developers, and you want to know there is a decently strong base of developers out there to discuss solutions with.
A successful pilot project release. Generally, when Microsoft Research releases something that they think is mature enough to be used in a commercial project, they will work with an organization to pilot it, and then release that project open source to as a proof of concept and trial-by-fire of all of the major features. This would give a lot of confidence that most of the common contract scenarios are covered and working.
More complete documentation. Plain and simple, at some point you're going to want to do something with contracts that you can't do yet using Microsoft Code Contracts. You want to be able to quickly and clearly reason that your scenario is not yet supported. The current documentation is going to keep you guessing and trying different things, though, in my opinion, which will result in a lot of wasted time.
It's not mature enough.
It will be as soon as Microsoft releases it with the affordable editions of VS, but without the static code analysis it's not usable at all.
The editions of VS, that have it, are so insanely expensive that only a handful of people will ever be able to afford it.
It's a shame Microsoft killed this amazing idea with their pricing policy. I wish Code Contracts would become mainstream, but they won't.
Epic fail.
We are about to get a canned package in that has been modified to our needs. I'm part of the team setup to prepare tests for it. It has an Oracle back end and I believe it's written in C++ .NET.
My question is what free or open source testing tools would you recommend.
Thanks
Ken
For regression testing of our applications I use a free tool called AutoHotKey http://www.autohotkey.com/. It is simple, batch configurable, and can work for virtually any application you have. Not exactly designed for black box testing, but a good free tool to add to your toolbox.
While there are a few good commercial applications for black box testing of applications (HoloDeck http://www.sisecure.com/holodeck/index.shtml, Cenzic Hailstorm http://www.cenzic.com/), the only open source applications that I know about only test network security (Spike http://www.immunitysec.com/resources-freesoftware.shtml, OWASP WebScarab http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project, and Nikto http://www.cirt.net/nikto2)
Value checking. See if only valid dates are exempted, number fields except the full range, ect.
What do you expect from such a tool? I don't know of any tool that can arbitrarily test any piece of software.
For what is sounds like you already know what it is that you want to check. Being a custom application your best bet would be to devise a test plan and manually test the values that you would like to validate.
Agree with the others - since the application has been modified to your needs, you should make sure that it actually is modified to your needs.
If the assembly isn't obfuscated, you can use FxCop to analyze the binaries and see if there are any critical bugs (note - if you're not familiar with fxcop and static analysis, find someone who is before reporting a ton of bugs that won't be fixed).
Beyond that, you're looking at more techniques vs. tools to get the job done.
Testing, either functional or non-functional, without reference to the
internal structure of the component or system.