As I recently spent some time writing and refactoring tests that utilize WebApplicationFactory, I’ve come to have some thoughts and ideas for improvement that I’d like to share. In this article, I’ll delve into the process of mocking dependencies in a DI container when using WebApplicationFactory, and offer some insights and best practices I’ve learned along the way. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or new to unit testing ASP.NET Core applications, I hope this information will be helpful as you work to simplify and streamline your tests. ... Read More

The purpose of this article is not to criticize the MediatR library. MediatR is a tool - and just like any tool, it has its own scope of application, and being used incorrectly might do more harm than good. This blog post summarizes my thoughts about using MediatR for supporting CQRS architecture.

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For the last year, I’ve had an opportunity to work quite a lot with Component Tests for microservices built with ASP.NET Core. The vocabulary related to testing is very vague and terms like Unit, Component, and Integration tests can be interpreted differently based on the context, so let me explain first what I mean by Component Tests. It’s a kind of test that treats your whole service as a black box. ... Read More

I discovered the power of Roslyn over three years ago and since then I’ve developed three Visual Studio extensions and a couple of code analyzers. Because I work on those tools only in my free time, the word “time” is a key here, so automation really matters. So far I’ve been using AppVeyor for building and testing my extensions. However, I’m a huge fan of integrated solutions because they require much less work for setup, and since GithubActions became generally available I wanted to give it a try. ... Read More

In the last two posts, I’ve described 14 different code smells related to the async/await keywords. Beside the problem description, I’ve also provided info about code analyzers that can detect and report given issue. Those analyzers come from a few different packages that are not strictly devoted to the asynchronous programming area. They also contain rules from other fields with predefined severity, which might not be appropriate to your needs, or you might not be interested in enforcing them at all. ... Read More

The new csproj format introduces two major changes that are important from the artifact metadata management perspective. First of all, a NuGet package definition was moved into the project file which allows sharing common attributes between NuGet package manifest and assembly info. Secondly, a new mechanism for generating source code of assembly metadata attributes was added, which shares some benefits from the first feature as well as simplify how these values can be overridden during the build process. ... Read More

With the new SDK format for .NET projects, it’s much easier to manage with the project’s dependencies. In most scenarios references added with standard mechanism (Visual Studio or dotnet cli) result in sufficient content in the output directory. However, sometimes we want to do something non-standard that requires a slightly different set of components in the output dir - simply speaking we expect to see there either more or fewer files. ... Read More

Two weeks ago .NET Core 3.0 was officially published. Together with the new framework version, Visual Studio 2019 got support for a long-awaited C# 8.0. The complete list of the new language features is available here on the MSDN, but the one that deserves special attention is Nullable reference types. This is a very important change in the language semantic, because from now we will be able to eliminate certain class of errors related to reference nullability on the compilation stage. ... Read More