Test-Driven Development Using Visual Studio

An emerging software engineering paradigm is test-driven development, where tests are written early and testing is performed continuously during the development process. Problems are discovered early and corrected when they are found. This one-day course for developers explains the methodology of test-driven development and the use of the unit testing framework that comes with Visual Studio 2008 Team System.

The course is practical, with many example programs and tests written in C#, including a cumulative case study. The goal is to quickly bring you up to speed in doing unit testing in your .NET development projects. The student will receive a comprehensive set of materials, including course notes and all the programming examples.

• The student should have a basic knowledge of the .NET Framework and experience programming in C# with Visual Studio.

On completion of this course, the student should be able to

• Understand the principles of test-driven development
• Acquire fluency in developing tests using the Visual Studio unit testing framework
• Efficiently exercise test suites using Visual Studio and MSTest

1 Days

Instructor-led course, with practical computer-based exercises.

• 1. Test-Driven Development
  • What Is Test-Driven Development (TDD)?
  • Functional Tests / Customer Tests
  • Unit Tests / Programmer Tests
  • Test Automation
  • Simple Design
  • Refactoring
  • A Visual Studio Test Drive
  • TDD with Legacy Code

• 2. Visual Studio Unit Testing Fundamentals
  • Structure of Unit Tests
  • Unit Testing Framework
  • Assertions
  • Test Cases
  • Test Classes
  • Test Runners
  • Ignoring Tests
  • Initialization and Cleanup

• 3. More about Unit Testing Framework
  • Expected Exceptions
  • Custom Asserts
  • Test Lists
  • Debugging Unit Tests
  • MSTest
  • Refactoring

Course exercises require Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition or Visual Studio 2008 Team System for Developers. The recommended operating system is Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.

A good minimal hardware profile for this course would have a 1 GHz or equivalent CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and at least 4 GB of free disk space for tools installation and courseware.