Autofixture

Why I’m not migrating to xUnit completely

Posted on by trailmax

After initial excitement about xUnit and how cool your tests become with AutoDataAttribute. My itch to convert all my tests into xUnit have died down. And I’m not excited as much. XUnit is certainly not the silver bullet.

I do agree with certain things that are in xUnit, like not providing [SetUp] and [TearDown], rather have constructor and destructor, but can’t agree with other things. And the authors of xUnit have not been listening to their community which is unfortunate. I’ll list the annoyances I discovered in the order I faced them.

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Convert your projects from NUnit/Moq to xUnit with NSubstitute

Posted on by trailmax

UPDATE: After initial excitement about xUnit, I needed to deal with some specifics. And now I don’t advise to move ALL your tests to xUnit. I’d recommend go into that slow and read through my rant here, before you commit to converting.

Nunit is a great testing framework. Only it is a little old now and new testing approaches are no longer fit into Nunit concepts. I’m talking about using Autofixture for generating test data. So I decided to see how xUnit will pan out for our projects and should we convert all our tests into xUnit or not.

Benefits of xUnit over NUnit are simple for me: AutoData attribute from Autofixture does not play nicely with NUnit due to architectural wirings. There are ways to have Autodata for
Nunit, but this does not work nicely with Resharper 8.1 and NCrunch.

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Constructor strategies for AutoFixture

Posted on by trailmax

For my unit tests I’m using an awesome tool Autofixture as data generator and as an Automocking container. But by default for creation of objects it uses the constructor with least number of arguments. Mark Seemann talks about this in his blog. Also he provides code on how to make Autofixture work the opposite way. But the code example in that blog post is outdated and no longer valid in the latest version of the framework.

So every time I need this (and this is not often) I have too search for the solution over-again. And just to save myself this research next time, I’ll put the solution here:

var fixture = new Fixture();

fixture.Customizations.Add(new MethodInvoker(new GreedyConstructorQuery()));

Autofixture and Moq to test Entity Framework project

Posted on by trailmax

In the past month I have been using brilliant tool from Mark Seemann called Autofixture. The tool is aiming unit tests and shall help you create objects with some data filled in.

Usually for unit tests you need to create your objects manually and give them some kind of data inside of the objects, so you don’t get NullReferenceExceptions. And that sometimes takes a while and not always pleasant:

        var person = new Person
        {
            FirstName = "Dilbert",
            MiddleName = "Wall-E",
            Surname = "Smith",
            KnownAs = "Pointy Haired Boss",
            DateOfBirth = new DateTime(1975, 12, 31),
            Gender = Gender.Male,
            MaritalStatus = MaritalStatus.Single,
        };

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