Image that you could open the designer, drag and drop a few test case, and run them with minimal writing... now take a look at this:

(Download a demo solution at http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/downloads/DragAndDropUnitTesting.zip )

Image that you could open the designer, drag and drop a few test case, and run them with minimal writing... now take a look at this:

(Download a demo solution at http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/downloads/DragAndDropUnitTesting.zip )

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how you could animate armies of thousands of soldiers ? flocks of hunderds of fish ? etc... Well, you use what they call Autonomous Agents: agents that have a local behavior that creates interresting global behaviors. The first example of autonomous agents was brought in 1984 by Craig Reynolds which developped a small application to simulation flocks: the boids application was born.

Since then, Reynolds has published an excellent paper in 99 on the subject: Steering behavior for Autonomous Characteres. If you never had a look at this, check out his web site and look at the java demo, it is just splendid!

Previous try

During my Phd, I monitored the course of C/C++ for third year Engineer students. The autonomous agents theme was very appealing and students got very involved into that project. (If you are looking for something fun for teaching software engineering, this theme is great!). At that time, they received a mini drawing library that could render agents in real time in OpenGL and Glut. If you want to give it a try, you can download it from www.dotnetwiki.org (look for Autonomous.binaries.zip in the download section) Of course, I tested the project on myself and built an application that looked as follows:

On the picture, you can see 151 agent (green dots) that are moving toward the little black dot. They are avoiding themselves, avoiding obstacles (big gray circle). The little lines between agents show that there is a "flocking" interaction,i.e. they are avoiding themselves.

During that project, we could see a lot of interresting properties of such flocks. For example, the system has a self-organization property. If you let the simulation go long enough, agents will organize themselves in a perfect triangular tiling as show below:

We could also see waves where the agents stopped going in reverse direction from the direction of the flock (In PDE theory, those are called shocks). In fact, it is the same phenomenon that occurs in traffic jam when a wave a "zero" velocity is travelling along the highway. When you stand back in your car, just look at the way you will start run a few hundred meters and the stop, and again and again. This behavior is predicted by the hyperbolic PDE theory :) In the figure below, the agents are moving left toward the little black dot. You can visualize the waves going right. The gray lines denote flock which means that agents are stopping in order to avoid each other.

NSteer

The code C++ was written using Tempate Meta Programming. In NSteer, I'll try to build gradually a framework for C#

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how you could animate armies of thousands of soldiers ? flocks of hunderds of fish ? etc... Well, you use what they call Autonomous Agents: agents that have a local behavior that creates interresting global behaviors. The first example of autonomous agents was brought in 1984 by Craig Reynolds which developped a small application to simulation flocks: the boids application was born.

Since then, Reynolds has published an excellent paper in 99 on the subject: Steering behavior for Autonomous Characteres. If you never had a look at this, check out his web site and look at the java demo, it is just splendid!

Previous try

During my Phd, I monitored the course of C/C++ for third year Engineer students. The autonomous agents theme was very appealing and students got very involved into that project. (If you are looking for something fun for teaching software engineering, this theme is great!). At that time, they received a mini drawing library that could render agents in real time in OpenGL and Glut. If you want to give it a try, you can download it from www.dotnetwiki.org (look for Autonomous.binaries.zip in the download section) Of course, I tested the project on myself and built an application that looked as follows:

On the picture, you can see 151 agent (green dots) that are moving toward the little black dot. They are avoiding themselves, avoiding obstacles (big gray circle). The little lines between agents show that there is a "flocking" interaction,i.e. they are avoiding themselves.

During that project, we could see a lot of interresting properties of such flocks. For example, the system has a self-organization property. If you let the simulation go long enough, agents will organize themselves in a perfect triangular tiling as show below:

We could also see waves where the agents stopped going in reverse direction from the direction of the flock (In PDE theory, those are called shocks). In fact, it is the same phenomenon that occurs in traffic jam when a wave a "zero" velocity is travelling along the highway. When you stand back in your car, just look at the way you will start run a few hundred meters and the stop, and again and again. This behavior is predicted by the hyperbolic PDE theory :) In the figure below, the agents are moving left toward the little black dot. You can visualize the waves going right. The gray lines denote flock which means that agents are stopping in order to avoid each other.

NSteer

The code C++ was written using Tempate Meta Programming. In NSteer, I'll try to build gradually a framework for C#

The full source of the BENUG presentation is available for download at http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/downloads/benug.package.zip

The file contains the two presentation I did (TFU.pdf and DPF.pdf in the Showtime folder), the CodeSmith templates and the sample project solution. The first presentation gave a quick introduction to unit testing tools + basic database testing. The second paper presented a new way of handling database testing through intelligent data generators (Database Populator Framework).

If you want to do the exercise of the DPF presentation, you should install TestDriven.Net....msi on your machine. Make sure you remove NUnitAddIn before doing that. This file is a special build of NUnitAddIn (now named TestDriven.Net) that ships with MbUnit.

The full source of the BENUG presentation is available for download at http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/downloads/benug.package.zip

The file contains the two presentation I did (TFU.pdf and DPF.pdf in the Showtime folder), the CodeSmith templates and the sample project solution. The first presentation gave a quick introduction to unit testing tools + basic database testing. The second paper presented a new way of handling database testing through intelligent data generators (Database Populator Framework).

If you want to do the exercise of the DPF presentation, you should install TestDriven.Net....msi on your machine. Make sure you remove NUnitAddIn before doing that. This file is a special build of NUnitAddIn (now named TestDriven.Net) that ships with MbUnit.

This addin explores a Typed DataSet generated by the Visual Studio and creates the table structure. For the example, selecting the NorthwindDataSet, you will get this output:

This addin explores a Typed DataSet generated by the Visual Studio and creates the table structure. For the example, selecting the NorthwindDataSet, you will get this output:

Reflector.Graph now builds and diplays the list of available addins and their menu location. Look for the Tools -> List of Reflector.Graph Addins menu item.

The TestFu Database Populator Framework (DPF presented here) is a framework for generating data for database testing. Given a DataSet, the framework can build a "smart" data generator to you can later use in your databse testing. I will present this at BENUG on sep. 9.

Why this framework ?

When you try to apply unit testing to database, you choices are not much: use transaction - clean up you "mess" after each test or even worse backup and restore the database on each test. In fact, there is an intrisic problem with unit testing of database: you cannot ensure the atomicity of each test, i.e. you cannot leave a database in the state that it was prior to the test (you could by restoring the db  from file at each test, but this is costly).

For example, transaction through enterprise services (see Roy's Rollback attribute) works great... but if you are using IDENTITY columns, then the identity counter is not reseted by the transaction and thus, the test case are correlated.

Now, what if we wanted to build unit tests for database that would not require clean up. This would mean that new data should be generated at each execution, since the previous execution would not have been cleaned up. This is where DPF comes into the picture: the DPF engine will generate new data for each of your unit test execution at no cost.

Generating random data is not difficult

That's true, the System.Random class is easy to use. However, things gets (a bit) more complicated when you generate data for database because you have to ensure that integrity constraint are enforced. This is why you will need such framework.

DPF How-to

The DPF totally relies on DataSet and comes with a few CodeSmith templates to accelerate development. The following how-to could be applied to any of your database.

1. If not done yet, create the strongly-typed DataSet of your database. You can do this by adding a new Typed DataSet to your project and drag and drop the tables in the designer. (Make sure VS has imported the constraint).
2. Open the DatabasePopulator.cst template. This template willl create a "strongly typed" database populator for a given database,
    
   where
   • Database will let you choose a database available on your machine, select the target database here,
   • Namespace  is the namespace of the strongly typed generator class,
   • TableNamePrefix is the table prefix in your database (in case there is one). This prefix will be trimmed to create the class names
3. Open the CrudPopulator.cst template and edit it in order to match the way your DAL access the database. This template will generate populator class that can apply CRUD operation to your database. You can also directly use that template and edit each "throw new NotImplementedException()" statement. (I strongly suggest you edit it the template for your needs).
4. Open the DatabasePopulatorTest.cst tempate and generate a fixture. This template will generate a fixture that will test each CRUD operation of each table in the database. The data necessary to those tests will be automatically generated by the populator.