Dennis Burton's Develop Using .NET

On October 4th and October 10th, my family will be participating in fund raising walks to raise money for research into better management, and someday a cure, for diabetes. Similar to many of the technical conferences I attend, these events provide a great place to get tips and tricks, and to share stories of shared experiences. As parents, we walk away from these events refreshed with new ideas and comforted that our struggles are shared. It is also a good place for my son Drew to be around other kids who have diabetes--a place where it is not unusual to do a blood sugar test before lunch.

Since last year, Drew has now moved on to first grade. He has become a voracious reader, loves launching model rockets, riding his bike, and of course, pestering his little brother. He lives a very full life, just like any other 6 year old boy, with a bit more ceremony around eating, exercise, and bedtime. One of his favorite activities is driving, whether it is Power Wheels, the lawn tractor, or popping dad’s car out of gear and releasing the emergency brake for a fun-filled ride into the ditch; he relishes every minute behind the wheel. As any 6 year old should, he now knows the tune to The Victors and most of the words. In short, this little guy does not let anything keep him from enjoying being a kid.

Through all of the cake and ice cream ridden birthday parties, hormone changes, and marathon play sessions, control has been pretty good so far this year. The last three A1c readings have been at 7.1%. The goal that we have been given by the endocrinologist is 8%. We try very hard, as parents, to learn and teach how to deal with life with diabetes so that Drew will have all the knowledge he needs to significantly reduce the risk of common complications. Through events like this walk, my hope is that in my lifetime, management of this disease will not be a 24/7 activity. If you would like to help support us in this endeavor, you can sponsor our team here:

JDRF Team Donation Page

The model binders in ASP.NET MVC represent a fantastic example of Coding by Convention. If you choose to abide by the naming rules, large amounts of work can be performed for you, but if you stray off of the path, you will have a lot of code to write. Let’s start with the simplest possible case, a model with a single property and a view with a single textbox for populating that property.

public class SimpleModel
{
  public string SimpleProperty { get; set; }
}

In order for a Create view to bind to this property, all that is required is the name attribute of any input type (like textbox) match the name of the property in the model you intend to populate, in this case SimpleProperty.

<input name="SimpleProperty" />

When the form is submitted, the Create action on the SimpleModelController is fired with a SimpleModel object as a parameter. This object has the SimpleProperty set with the value from the <input> with the same name. Pretty cool, but where is the massive amount of work being done for me?

Nested Classes

Now, lets make the model class a bit more interesting. This time, the model will be an outer class containing a nested class.

public class OuterClass
{
  public string SomeProperty { get; set; }
  public NestedClass Nested { get; set; }
}

public class NestedClass
{
  public string SomeOtherProperty { get; set; }
}

Now, if you use the Add View wizard, the resulting view will not contain any reference to the NestedClass, but really who keeps those around anyway? (Until v2 when you can customize the template.) Just as in the previous sample, we need an <input> for each property that should be populated with values from the POST. SomeProperty is the same case as the previous sample; Nested and SomeOtherProperty are slightly different. To understand the convention applied to this binding, think of how you would access SomeOtherProperty from an instance of an OuterClass. You would access the outerClass.Nested.SomeOtherProperty, but remember outerClass is our model and does not need to be named, so we are left with Nested.SomeOtherProperty.

<input name="SomeProperty"/> 
<input name="Nested.SomeOtherProperty" />

Again, when the form is submitted, the Create action on the OuterClassController will have a fully populated OuterClass as a parameter including an instance of NestedClass with SomeOtherProperty set. Now, I am starting to get impressed. The techniques used to map controls to objects within WebForms, are starting to look pretty clunky. The default model binder is a powerful tool as long as you follow the naming rules.

Nested Lists

This next scenario is where it all clicked for me. I was trying to bind a dynamic list of objects to a property of my model. This is a simplified version of the scenario I was looking at:

public class LogEntry 
{ 
  public int BloodSugar { get; set; } 
  public List<FoodEntry> FoodEntries { get; set; } 
} 

public class FoodEntry 
{ 
  public string Name { get; set; } 
  public string Carbs { get; set; } 
}

Just as with simple nested property, the default strongly-typed view creator will not add any UI elements for the nested class. That is fine; fewer lines of code for us to delete. To set up the view correctly, think of the description given in the last sample for the naming convention and the Rule of Least Surprise. If you think of how to access each individual element of FoodEntries you would have FoodEntries[N].Name and FoodEntries[N].Carbs. These are the names required of our input elements on the view.

<div class="logEntry"> 
  <div class="bloodSugarEntry"> 
    <label for="BloodSugar">BloodSugar:</label> 
    <input type="text" name="BloodSugar" />
  </div> 
  <div class="foodEntries"> 
    <div class="foodEntry"> 
      <label for="FoodEntries[0].Name">Name:</label>
      <input type="text" name="FoodEntries[0].Name" /> 
      <label for="FoodEntries[0].Carbs">Carbs:</label>
      <input type="text" name="FoodEntries[0].Carbs" /> 
    </div> 
    <input type="button" value="Add More" name="FoodEntries_AddMore" /> 
  </div> 
  <div> 
    <input type="submit" value="Log It!" /> 
  </div> 
</div>

Now that there is some structure in the HTML that we can leverage, we can start adding some dynamic client side behavior. In this case, I want to be able to add more food items to the form without having to postback or even perform any AJAX requests. JQuery will be leveraged to inject more food entries into the DOM. The following code is added to the click event from the FoodEntries_AddMore button.

$('#FoodEntries_More').click(function() { 
    var nextFoodEntryIndex = $('.foodEntry').size(); 
    var nextFoodEntryNamespace = 'FoodEntries[' + nextFoodEntryIndex + ']';

    var newFoodEntry = $('<div class="foodEntry">' + 
                         '<label for="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '.Name">Name:</label>' + 
                         '<input type="text" id="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '_Name"' +
                         'name="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '.Name" />' + 
                         '<label for="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '.Carbs">Carbs:</label>' + 
                         '<input type="text" id="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '_Carbs"' +
                         'name="' + nextFoodEntryNamespace + '.Carbs" />' + 
                         '</div>'); 

    $('.foodEntry:last').after(newFoodEntry); 
});

What this does is look at the set of food entries to determine how many are on the current page in order to determine the index used for the name on the next row of food entries. The first click will result in adding FoodEntries[1].Name and FoodEntries[1].Carbs. These names follow the naming convention that we established earlier. The default model binder recognizes this naming convention and populates the LogEntry object with as many FoodEntry items as have been created on the page.

Summary

All of this auto-magic binding assumes that you are willing and able to follow the naming conventions necessary to have the default model binder do the work for you. If you are facing an exceptional situation where the default model binder will not work for you, use a FormCollection in the Create method and do all of the parsing yourself or create a custom model binder. As you can imagine, these tasks can become complicated and unreadable. So if at all possible, try to follow the path that does the work for you. It is worth noting that this is not at all like the drag and drop designers that have a habit of creating poor, hard-to-maintain code. All that is happening here is a form element to object mapping with the code on either end being as elegant as you like.

Where is the code?

Code for this post can be found on GoogleCode at http://dennisburton.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/PostSamples.

Speaking at CodeStock 2009

This year CodeStock is shaping up to be a conference like no other. Most regional conferences have around 25 sessions with some attempt to do Open Spaces on the side. CodeStock 2009 will certainly blow the doors off the norm with a community driven event with something to offer for everyone. To start with, it is the first conference that I know of that allowed the early registering attendees to choose the direction for the more than 50 hour-long sessions as well as 6 extended hands-on sessions. Then, to kick it up one more notch, Alan Stevens will be facilitating the Open Spaces. Make no mistake: Alan knows how to do Open Spaces right. Last year’s CodeStock was the moment the community took notice of the way that Alan’s particular talent set meshes with coordinating an exceptionally effective Open Space event. This is truly an event that has something to offer everyone.

Given the community selection process, it is even more of an honor to be selected to speak at this event. I will be giving the PatternsInTesting presentation that has already been well received in the Midwest area.

Indy Code Camp 2009

I was privileged to be able to give the PatternsInTesting presentation at Indy Code Camp this year. There were many really good testing related conversations before and after the presentation. I am encouraged by the amount of interest the community is taking towards improving the adoption of test driven design. I also got to see a few top notch presentations:

• Tim Wingfield - Care About Your Craft: A very motivating presentation on doing the right thing
• Philip Japikse - CRUD Sucks! NHibernate to the rescue: Phil has an impressive in depth knowledge of NHibernate. I was most fascinated by all of the extensions that he has written to really make NHibernate hum.
• Jon Fuller - Dealing with Dependencies: This was my favorite presentation of the day. Jon had only enough slides for an overview and went directly in to writing code. It was an in depth, working look at using DI tools.
• Michael Eaton - Developing Solid WPF Applications: A very informative view into a real world WPF application and its development evolution

Greater Lansing .net User Group

A big thank you to GLUGnet for letting me do the PatternsInTesting presentation for the group. This is a group that I frequently attend, it is nice to be able to present on a topic that I talk about so much with the members of that group.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to observe the interaction with an object and verify that this interaction is in your best interest.

The Scenario

Some objects that you have to consume are just poorly written. The ones that are most egregious always seem to be the ones you have no control over. That lack of control may be because you have no access to the source, it may be because it would be a political minefield to change the source, or a lack of tests makes the team afraid to change the source. It seems like every time I go to a new client, these objects exist (as well as the political minefields). The developers have a mysterious set of incantations that they have memorized for interaction with these objects in order to avoid bugs. Often, no one knows where these "rules" came from and they are usually not written down.

The Vocabulary

The name of this pattern is the Spy. What the spy will do is capture information about interaction with an object, and only take action if the need arises. A spy object looks just like the object that you need to interact with (i.e. implements the same public interface) such that your code should not even notice it is even there, but, behind the scenes it will perform validation and give the useful feedback you wish the original object would have implemented in the first place. This spy or validation wrapper is commonly implemented by holding on to a reference to original object. This allows for the spy to call the actual implementation in order to preserve the original behavior.

The ideal world

In an ideal world, the kinds of interactions that you are trying to validate with a spy should be captured be captured by the actual object you are interacting with, rather than the spy. Having a wrapper object whose function is validation is a massive code smell. If you have the ability to fix the original code by adding the relevant validation, that is by far a better solution than creating a spy object.

The real world

In reality, you do not have access to change the source of third party libraries, even if sometimes that third party is a couple of buildings or even cubes away. The first thing you should do when you run in to these bizarre incantations “required” for successful object interaction, is to ask “why?” and be persistent, dig deep. You may be (not so) surprised that most of the reasons have long since gone away. If you do find that some of the hidden rules are indeed valid, you need a way to validate that your code is following the rules.

Example

Consider the following example where MethodToObserve will throw an uninformitive exception if the PropertyToObserve has not yet been set.

As mentioned previously, the ideal solution is to fix the implementation. If your only access to this code is Reflector or you are just not authorized to change it, the next best thing is to protect yourself (flaming email to the author of the code is,of course, optional). Our protection, or at least better information will come from a class implementing IInterfaceToUse just like the original, only this time the implementation will provide the consumer with information that they can act on.

Note that this time, instead of the “oops, I forgot something exception” known in .net as the “Object reference not set to instance of an object” exception, we get meaningful information about what is missing and even some hint as to how to fix it. The error now clearly states that the PropertyToObserve should be set prior to calling the MethodToObserve.

Using the spy

There are many ways to create a spy object, I chose containment for this post; You may also use derivation to create your wrapper. Derivation will get you up and running faster, and you will not have maintenance work to do if you add a method to the interface, but this will come at a cost. Containment will allow you to swap out the actual implementation of the object with a mock implementation at some time in the future. As always consider you needs before choosing a spy implementation.

The test below shows how to use the spy created in this post

Tool Support

All of the previous posts in this series have mentioned leveraging tools to assist in creating these test objects. They spy object however is a strange beast; the demands it places on the tools turn out to create as much code as the manually coded version. If you are so inclined, you can use Rhino for a spy object. What is required is taking advantage of the Do extension method. Do takes a delegate as a parameter that matches the signature of the method being called. So what you will end up establishing is an Expectation that a method will be called and when it is Do the operation specified by the delegate.

Summary

The spy object reminds me of the Broken Windows section of the Pragmatic Programmer. It clearly states not to live with broken windows, but if you cannot fix the window, at least put a board over the window. In the case of third party code where you cannot change the source code, a validation wrapper is the board you need to keep further damage from occurring and show other developers in the area that you still care about the quality of code.

The Series

PatternsInTesting[2] - Stub Pattern PatternsInTesting[4] - Mock Pattern

I love my MX Revolution mouse. It is the most comfortable mouse I have used to date. For me, this is the first mouse that the wireless works without glitches, the scroll wheel has virtually no resistance, and there are a pile of programmable features on well placed buttons. As a desktop mouse, I would suggest anyone give it a try.

As a presentation mouse, however, it did not work so well. The scroll wheel with no resistance would scroll under its own weight causing my slides to advance and back up in a very rapid fashion. This is a great example of a highly desired feature in one context being a complete hindrance in another. Now off I go to  find a device well suited for presentations.

I will be presenting items from the PatternsInTesting series as well as some additional content in the Test Driven is Driving me Insane talk at the Great Lakes .net User Group on 3/18/2009 and at the Northwest Ohio .net User Group on 4/21/2009. This has been a really fun talk so far and I have enjoyed the conversation it generates. Stop by if you can make it.

I will be presenting items from the PatternsInTesting series at the Greater Lansing .net User Group Flint meeting. I was compelled to put this blog series and presentation together to address the pain many organization experience when trying to include automated testing into their development process. The content is based on the insight and lessons learned that I have picked up by experiencing the same transition in multiple organizations. Participants in this presentation will walk away with tools for writing more effective tests and how to better identify issues in tests.

The Scenario

On our continuing quest to create unit tests that exercise only the class under test, we look at another common scenario that occurs while writing tests. As with the Dummy, our class under test has a dependency on another class, only this time the dependent class has an active role in our test. Our testing needs are about the logic of the class under test and not the interaction with the dependent object. In order to create a good test, the class under test must be isolated from the dependent object.

An example of this scenario might look like this:

The class under test in this scenario is Fib, which has a dependency on an ICalculator. The test's objective is to validate that the Next method returns the correct result for some well-known examples.

The Vocabulary

The name of this pattern is the Stub. A stub stands in the place of the actual object in use and provides known answers and predictable behavior. If you are doing any sort of evolutionary development, chances are that the initial versions of your classes more resemble stubs then real code. Why? The goal is the same: you wrote stub functionality to allow you to focus your development efforts on different parts of the system. This is exactly what we are doing with Stub tests: isolate one part of the system from another by providing known results.

The solution without tools

Unlike with a Dummy, providing a class that throws a NotImplementedExcpetion in the Add method does not meet our needs. Since the functionality of ICalculator is outside the scope of this test, we assume that it is working correctly (and hopefully under test). A simplistic implementation of ICalculator will work nicely. Since we are not testing the calculator, provide a simplistic calculator that returns fixed results.

The test will check that the Next method returns the correct result given the StubCalculator. What we end up doing here is fully exercising the Fib class with known values from its dependent classes. The stub gives us the proper level of isolation for this test.

The solution with Rhino Mocks

For this version, leverage Rhino Mocks to keep us from having to code physical versions of the Stub class. Using Rhino's Fluent Interface, this reads as Expect a call on Calculator with the parameters 2 and 3, and when making this call return 5 as a result.

The tools advantage

Just as discussed with IComplicated in the Dummy sample, adding methods to ICalculator does not require any additional maintenance of this test. However, unlike the Dummy sample, calls into the stub return the expected value. Additional benefits can easily pile up. Consider adding multiple calls to Add with different parameters. The hand-coded version would need some sort of conditional logic to determine what to return based on the calling parameters. Complexity adds up fast, even in the simple example listed here. Using Rhino, one concise and readable line of code can use new parameters for an additional expectation, including the expected result, and Rhino deals with matching up the parameters with the correct result. This is just a glimpse into the functionality offered by Rhino; the upcoming patterns will cover even more capability.

Isolation effects

Should a test that checks the result of the Next method fail if there is something wrong with the ICalculator implementation? The answer, as always, is "it depends." This test should fail if we were writing an integration test—a test that ensures all the pieces of a system are working together. This test should not fail based on ICalculator if it is a unit test, focused only on the result of Next. Isolating ICalculator from Fib helps build a set of unit tests that can quickly identify the location of errors introduced into a system. The stub is a common pattern of isolation, and using it will make a marked and immediate improvement in your tests.

The Series

PatternsInTesting[4] - Mock Pattern

The Scenario

One of the characteristics of a good unit test is that the object under test is the only object being exercised. The problem in this scenario is that the object under test requires a dependent object, even though the functionality of the dependent object is not used in the test. To make a good test, the dependent object needs to be isolated from the class under test.

An example of this scenario might look like this:

The dependency in ClassUnderTest is that its constructor requires an instance of an object that implements IAmComplicated. The rather simple objective of this test is to validate that DoInternalStuff returns Pi within a reasonable amount of rounding error.

The Vocabulary

The name of this pattern is the Dummy. It is unclear to me whether this is a reference to the object that enables isolation for the test or a reference to the original author of the code. It seems to be a code smell for this scenario to even occur. However, sometimes you need to use an external library and do not have liberty of changing the code.

The solution without tools

Using only Visual Studio, add a class that implements IAmComplicated, right-click on it, and choose implement interface. Every method in the class will throw a NotImplementedException. This class meets the needs of the test because none of the methods are ever called; its only purpose is existence.This is your Dummy.

This Dummy class allows us to create the following test:

The solution with Rhino Mocks

Rhino Mocks has the capability to create an object at runtime by reflecting the IAmComplicated interface. This gives us the capability we need without having to maintain another class in the test project. Since Rhino is reflecting the interface at runtime, adding a method to the interface at a later date does not require changes to the test code. There are several different ways Rhino could give us a placeholder for IAmComplicated. Here we will use a simple one line call to GenerateStub.

This one line saves us an entire file of maintenance, and our test only requires minor modification to use this technique. Place the call to Rhino as the parameter to the ClassUnderTest constructor instead of creating a new ComplicatedDummy.

Isolation of Failure

One of the primary goals of good unit tests is to identify exactly which unit caused the error. By applying this pattern, tests that cover ClassUnderTest no longer require an implementation of IAmComplicated to instantiate without failure. This helps shorten your bug hunting cycle by reducing the areas that indicate error to where the real error occurred. As you attain higher levels of isolation and better definition of units, you will find you spend much less time in the debugger. This means spending less time finding problems more time fixing them.

The Series

PatternsInTesting[2] - Stub Pattern PatternsInTesting[4] - Mock Pattern

It does not matter if your test philosophy is Test Driven Development, Test Eventually Development, or I write tests occasionally. Very early in your testing experience, you will want to start isolating portions of your application or libraries. Without this isolation, you will start seeing a fragile set of tests that make it challenging to track down the point of failure. In order to reach the level of isolation that your tests need, you will need to introduce Mocks (or Test Doubles) to your testing toolbox.

The Testing Story

Someone on your team (extra geek cred if it was you) brings the concept of adding tests to the development process. No doubt there is some confusion at first. What are tests? How do we write them? This phase quickly passes as the team finds things that they understand how to test. This initial period of enlightenment yields great results. Everyone is happy that code is doing what it should be doing. Occasionally, the team celebrates when a broken test flags an unintended change. Clearly development will never be the same again.

As time goes on and the test library gets larger, you start to notice that a breaking change often causes quite a few tests to fail. The team finds this annoying, but decides having tests is better than developer life before tests. At some point though, the tests start to feel burdensome. Adding simple changes start to propagate through the whole system of tests. Discouragement and discontentment set in, and some of your team members want to abandon developing with tests.

Enter Mocks

At this point, the prominent options are to ignore the tests (the blue pill) or find a way to make the tests better (the red pill). This series will cover some of the test development patterns used to isolate areas of your code in the hopes that you will choose the red pill. The goal for the initial four or five posts will be to cover the types of scenarios that occur in test code and what common solutions look like. After that, I hope to cover some of the patterns for dealing with legacy code as I am currently reading through Working Effectively with Legacy Code and it seems relevant to the client I am working with.

The Mock Controversy

There has been considerable conversation in the community about the usage of the term mock. Some prominent members of the development community have been pushing for changing the vocabulary to test doubles, where mock, stub, fake and spy are a particular type of test doubles. My take on this is that these test double types are each describing the scenario where it is useful and the technique for solving the problem; this is describing a pattern. Good names are the key to effective patterns, and we have a good set of names for pattern description. It really does not matter what you call the concept (mocking | doubling | faking | test doubles) if the pattern names describe the scenario effectively.

What's next?

This Series of posts will explore these test double patterns and decompose a few alternate implementations.

The Series