Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .Net By: James W. Newkirk and Alexei A. Vorontsov Publisher: Microsoft Press

Review by Andrew Novick   

Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .Net is as much about the philosophy of test-driven development then it is about the tools available to support it.  It’s a philosophy that you don’t have to buy into in order to use the tools and the instruction in NUnit and FIT that.

If you’re not already familiar with NUnit, the reader is encouraged to read Appendix A, which is about NUnit, first.  I suppose the authors think that most of the readers have already learned to use NUnit but if you've used it for a while you probably don't need this book.  They could have safely made his appendix chapter 2 but it seems that they wanted to de-emphasize the tool.

Chapters 2 and 3 show the heart of the philosophy: developing and refactoring code based on writing tests.  In the test-driven methodology the test should be written as the code is written by writing a test first, then coding the implementation for the test, even if the code to implement satisfy the test isn’t sufficient for the ultimate implementation of the code under construction. 

I don’t really buy this philosophy in its entirety.  I’m all for designing the tests before the implementation and building the tests before implementing the code.  Where I differ is the value of implementing code that isn’t going to be part of the ultimate implementation.  Part of this may be a legacy from my early years of programming where the turn around time for testing an program was so long.  When it took half an hour to an hour to load a card deck, submit your compile and test job, you made sure every run counted.  Now that the time has shrunk to seconds there may be little lost in implementing code just to satisfy a test but I’m not so sure that there is much gained either.

Never mind my opinion, I find it valuable to understand the philosophy of the authors. I’ll integrate much of it into my practice over the coming months.  Maybe even more than I'm ready to admit right now.

The book isn’t overly long at 256 pages of text.  It’s a quick read, particular because I found it bogging down towards the middle to end and I started to skim a bit.  These are the chapters on customer tests using the FIT framework, something that I’m not quite ready to implement, particularly because I’m working on the compact framework right now where FIT doesn’t run.  There are also chapters on ASP.Net pages and Web Services tests and an additional Appendix on using transactions in ADO.Net. 

All-in-all this is a valuable book for learning NUnit, which lacks a lot of documentation, and for understanding the test-driven philosophy.  I’d recommend it for any .Net developer who's ready to adopt NUnit or to experiment with test-driven development.