This is the second part of a two part article on mock objects and the Inversion of Control pattern. In this article, you will see how to use the code presented in the last article. The previous article dealt mostly with theory, this article shows how easy it is to use the code shown in the last article. You will, of course, need to be familiar with the first part of this series in order to understand this article. Articles on NUnit can be found here and here.

This relatively advanced article describes a solution to a particular problem that can arise when you are designing unit tests. Unit tests frequently rely on mock objects. In many cases, mock objects are fairly easy to use. However, there are occasions when it can seem quite difficult to interject a mock object into your tests. This paper is designed to demonstrate the solution to one such occasion when it might not be obvious how to use mock objects.

There are many different types of tests that are commonly discussed in the literature on this subject. In fact, there are at least six main types of tests, and the boundaries between them can be fuzzy at times. Nevertheless, it is possible to make at least a few generalizations which can help you navigate the lingo found in most texts and web sites. This article is designed to give you basic definitions for each of the following types of tests:

• Unit Tests
• Integration Tests
• Functional Tests
• Stress, Load and Performance Tests
• Acceptance Tests
• Regression Tests

This article explains how to create projects and repositories in a free, open source version control system called Subversion. The online documentation for Subversion is excellent, but the information found here may help people who are still getting up to speed with the product. I will assume that you have already installed Subversion and TortoiseSVN.

This article describes how to use NUnit with Visual Studio 2005. In particular, I am using Visual Studio 2005 v 8.50727, which is similar to release candidate 1. This is a solid build of Visual Studio, but NUnit needs to be reconfigured to work with it smoothly. The solution to this problem is simple and fairly well known by this time, but I thought I would spell it out here, just so I would have an easily accessible written record of it.

This article completes the two part series on using NAnt to alter .NET config files. The previous article in this series demonstrated how to use NAnt properties, how to use multiple NAnt build files in a single project, and how to use xmlpeek and xmlpoke. This article will show how to pass data back and forth between NAnt files, how to reuse NAnt code, and how to add some simple C# scripts into your build files. This later technique will allow you to add the expressive power of C# to a simple NAnt XML build script.

We live in a post factual world. When confronted with an inconvenient fact, politicians, marketers and bloggers never acknowledge its truth. Instead, they attempt to "spin" the facts, to distort reality. Such behavior is so common that most of us no longer blink when confronted by even its most blatant expressions. We believe that WMD simultaneously exists and does not exist, we think the definition of the word "is" might be open to interpretation. The sin is not confined to any one party, it is universal. No place is the distorting influence of the post factual world felt more clearly than on the Internet.

Unit tests work best when you have close to 100 percent coverage of the methods in your project. The problem, of course, is that it is not always easy to know if you have tested every method in your application. Problems also occur when tests do not thoroughly cover all the paths through a particular method. For instance, there may be logical branches in a method that are never explored. The solution to problems of this type is a tool called NCover, which is based on the JCover tool and similar utilities.

NAnt is a cross platform, open source, build tool for use with Mono or .NET. You can use it for automating builds, automating unit testing runs, or for version control. NAnt has no built in GUI interface, nor will it write your unit tests for you. Instead, it provides a powerful means of scripting these tasks so that they are performed automatically with a single command. With NAnt, it is easy to write scripts that work unchanged on both Linux and Windows.

Unit testing is an easy technology to learn, but very difficult to master. In particular, problems often occur when developers try to start testing user interfaces, modules that are not complete yet, database code, or code that depends on network interactions. There are various ways to solve these kinds of problems, but one of the most interesting involves the use of mock objects.

Thomas Friedman, the author of “The World is Flat,” explains in this morning's New York Times that the economic engine in Bangalore, India is reaching a new phase. "We're going from a model of doing piecework to where the entire product and entire innovation stream is done by companies here," the CEO of a large Indian company told Friedman.