25 posts tagged with "automated testing"

Going off piste​

I've written before about how unit testing Entity Framework is a contentious and sometimes pointless activity. The TL;DR is that LINQ-to-Objects != Linq-to-Entities and so if you want some useful tests around your data tier then integration tests that actually hit a database are what you want.

• Me: "It can't be done"
• Him: "Yes it can"
• Me: "No it can't"
• Him: "Yes it can, I've just done it"
• Me: "Ooooh! Show me ..."

Just recently I've noticed that there appears to be something of a controversy around Unit Testing and Entity Framework. I first came across it as I was Googling around for useful posts on using MOQ in conjunction with EF. I've started to notice the topic more and more and as I have mixed feelings on the subject (that is to say I don't have a settled opinion) I thought I'd write about this and see if I came to any kind of conclusion...

I was recently working with my colleagues on refactoring a legacy application. We didn't have an immense amount of time available for this but the plan was to try and improve what was there as much as possible. In its initial state the application had no unit tests in place at all and so the plan was to refactor the code base in such a way as to make testing it a realistic proposition. To that end the domain layer was being heavily adjusted and the GUI was being migrated from WebForms to MVC 3. The intention was to build up a pretty solid collection of unit tests. However, as we were working on this we realised we had a problem with properties on our models with internal setters...