A few years ago, I blogged about a way to automate unit testing of null argument validation. Its usage looked like this:
[Fact] public void FullOuterJoin_Throws_If_Argument_Is_Null() { var left = Enumerable.Empty<int>(); var right = Enumerable.Empty<int>(); TestHelper.AssertThrowsWhenArgumentNull( () => left.FullOuterJoin(right, x => x, y => y, (k, x, y) => 0, 0, 0, null), "left", "right", "leftKeySelector", "rightKeySelector", "resultSelector"); } Basically, for each of the specified parameters, the AssertThrowsWhenArgumentNull method rewrites the lambda expression by replacing the corresponding argument with null, compiles and executes it, and checks that it throws an ArgumentNullException with the appropriate parameter name.
FakeItEasy is a popular mocking framework for .NET, with an very intuitive and easy-to-use API. For about one year, I’ve been a maintainer of FakeItEasy, along with Adam Ralph and Blair Conrad. It’s been a real pleasure working with them and I had a lot of fun!
Today I’m glad to announce that we’re releasing FakeItEasy 3.0.0, which supports .NET Core and introduces a few useful features.
Let’s see what’s new!
Today I’d like to share a nice feature I discovered recently in FakeItEasy.
When you write unit tests for a class that takes dependencies, you typically need to create fake/mock dependencies and manually inject them into the SUT (System Under Test), or use a DI container to register the fake dependencies and construct the SUT. This is a bit tedious, and a few months ago I came up with an auto-mocking Unity extension to make it easier.
Unit testing can be tedious sometimes, especially when testing classes that have complex dependencies. Fortunately, some tools make it somewhat easier. I’ve been using FakeItEasy a lot recently; it’s a very easy to use mocking framework for .NET. It has a very lean and simple API based on generics and lambda expressions, and is a real pleasure to work with. It came as a breath of fresh air compared to the old RhinoMocks I had been using before.
Recently, my team and I started writing unit tests on an application that uses a lot of async code. We used NUnit (2.6) because we were already familiar with it, but we had never tried it on async code yet.
Let’s assume the system under test is this very interesting Calculator class:
public class Calculator { public async Task<int> AddAsync(int x, int y) { // simulate long calculation await Task.Delay(100).ConfigureAwait(false); // the answer to life, the universe and everything.
When unit testing a method, one of the things to test is argument validation : for instance, ensure that the method throws a ArgumentNullException when a null argument is passed for a parameter that isn’t allowed to be null. Writing this kind of test is very easy, but it’s also a tedious and repetitive task, especially if the method has many parameters… So I wrote a method that automates part of this task: it tries to pass null for each of the specified arguments, and asserts that the method throws an ArgumentNullException.