I have spoken to a number of people who have been put-off by installing Git as it seems difficult. To prove that it’s not, I decided to put together a very quick screencast to highlight the main points. As I wanted it to be quick and to the point I decided not to add voice-over and instead use call-outs where required.

If you want to know more, then I really recommend you check out TekPub as they have done a great series on how to take full advantage of Git.

Labels: Git

When using IronRuby to test C# applications we are still faced with similar issues as with C# – the different is how we can handle them. For example, to stub the HttpRequestBase in C#, we could use Rhino Mocks as follows.

var stubbedHttpRequest = MockRepository.GenerateStub<HttpRequestBase>().Stub(x=>x.ApplicationPath).Return(“~/test”);

I do really like this syntax and think it works for C#.  However, if we are looking to use Ruby and a dynamic language we have the potential to be more inventive.

IronRuby has an excellent framework called Caricature which allows you to fake CLR objects. For example, here we are stubbing the HttpRequestBase from MVC.

require 'caricature'
include Caricature
stubHttpRequest = isolate System::Web::HttpRequestBase     
stubHttpRequest.when_receiving(:application_path).return("~/test")    
stubHttpRequest 

However, this got me thinking. With Ruby being dynamic, how could we take advantage when defining fakes? For example, what about the following syntax:

stubHttpRequest = stub 'System::Web::HttpRequestBase
                          .ApplicationPath.returns("~/test") &&
                          .FilePath.returns("")'

This would stub two properties, ApplicationPath and FilePath to return “~/test” and an empty string respectively. If we wanted to handle method calls and arguments, we could have the following:

stubHttpRequest = stub 'System::Web::HttpRequestBase
                          .SomeMethodCall("WithArgument").returns(SomeObject.new) && 
                          .SomeOtherMethod(*).returns(-1)'

Here we stub two methods, one stubs with a particular argument (must be the string “WithArgument”) while the other matches on any argument.

My aim is to reduce the ceremony associated with the act of stubbing and instead focus on the true intent of the defined behaviour.

Note: Imagine the ‘refactoring’ problem has been solved, and changing the method names would also update the tests.

If we look at other languages, for example Javascript’s jqMock and Ruby’s NotAMock are using a similar syntax to C#.

var alertMock = new jqMock.Mock(window, "alert");
alertMock.modify().args("hello world new!").returnValue();

I think it is time to start looking beyond the existing syntax and reveal our true intent. What do you think?

Labels: Ruby, Testing

This week I went over to CodeMash, an amazing community and cross-language conference in the US. I had some amazing conversations, meet some amazing people and gave a session on Testing ASP.net using Ruby.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who attended and the organisers for giving me the opportunity to speak. If you have any questions\comments, then please give me a shout, Twitter is the best way.

The code I used during the demo can be found on GitHub - http://github.com/BenHall/Kona 

I created a tag so you can download the zip of the code, now and in the future without being affected by other changes - http://github.com/BenHall/Kona/zipball/CodeMash_2010. In future I plan to keep working on this code as a sample so you might want to keep an eye on the repository. 

Also, if you would like to know more about Testing ASP.net web applications, then I recommend you take a look at the book I co-authored, check out http://www.testingaspnet.com

Labels: BDD, book, IronRuby, TestingASPnet

RSpec, IronRuby and RubyMine is an amazing combination. Here is a screenshot of an example I’m currently working on…

All I do is execute the Rake command below, which exists in my rakefile.rb. Rubymine does the rest! Very cool.

desc "Run all examples"
Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new('examples') do |t|
  t.spec_files = FileList['examples/**/*.rb']
end