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Why it pays to read more than just the first compiler message

Posted on 9 February 2015 by

Error messages are frustrating. Especially when you can’t figure out why you are getting them.

Take this bit of code:

It produces a ‘TestProject.ComparingCollections.SimpleDataAccessLayer_Tests.MountainComparer’ does not implement inherited abstract member ‘System.Collections.Generic.Comparer<ActualProject.ComparingCollections.Mountain>.Compare(ActualProject.ComparingCollections.Mountain, ActualProject.ComparingCollections.Mountain)’ error for the MountainComparer class.

Wah?

What do you mean?

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Why it pays to invest some time learning the syntax and terminology of a language

Posted on 31 January 2015 by

Marjan Venema 1 Comment ↓

Syntax is boring. Absolutely boring. So is theory and terminology. But neither is trivial. And neither is superfluous. Not if you want to get up to speed as quickly as possible.

Syntax differs from language to language. Everybody accepts that. Not everybody is as aware that while the concepts of object orientation are the same across object oriented languages,

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Testing an abstract base class – code example

Posted on 17 January 2015 by

Marjan Venema No Comments ↓

In the “How do I test an abstract base class if I can’t instantiate it?” post, you found out that you can actually test an abstract base class even though you can’t instantiate one.

The “all you need to do is” end of the post, however,

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How does my mock know what value I want?

Posted on 3 January 2015 by

Marjan Venema No Comments ↓

It is early afternoon. You just started your job at Glamorous Inc. Your buddy this morning talked about unit tests. How they want all code to have unit tests but also have code that was written before they started doing that. And they want you to start by getting some of that code under test.

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How do I make a method use a different class in unit tests?

Posted on 28 December 2014 by

Marjan Venema No Comments ↓

The code you work on has this wonderful simple method. All it does is use a couple of other classes, passing through the parameters it received and setting some properties.

As it is such a simple function nobody bothered to write any tests for it. After all, “It only passes through to another class.”

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