Showing posts with label SPRetreat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPRetreat. Show all posts

Monday 2 May 2011

SharePoint Retreat South West London

Overview:  Ashraf Islam & I are presenting a SharePoint Retreat on 14 May in Cobham (South West London).  We are looking at LINQ to SharePoint & InfoPath on the day.  This event broadly follows Andrew Woodward's SharePoint Retreat format: so it's free, everyone attending will get real world coding practice and we to retrospectives after each session.  http://www.21apps.com/sharepoint/spretreat-swlondon2011/
To book for the event: http://spretreatswlondon.eventbrite.com/

LINQ to SharePoint Session Downloads:
VS project - create lists & set up referential integrity.
VS project - deploy a visual user control web part via a sandbox solution. 

Update 14 May 2011 - Thanks to everyone - i gained a lot from the day, good to meet a and discuss things with some passionate devs & architects - paul
Update 28 May 2011 - Video I recorded on using LINQ to SharePoint

Thursday 10 March 2011

Unit Testing for SharePoint 2010 - Part 2

Part 1 of Unit Testing for SharePoint 2010

Overview:  Part 1 discusses setting up nUnit and TDD.NET on you dev machine and writing a simple unit test.  This post looks at using TypeMock Isolator to unit test SharePoint dependent code.
//Arrange
//Act
//Assert
Background:  I haven't used TypeMock Isolator in the last 2 years but the latest version still is a good candidate for testing SharePoint 2010 based applications.   The TypeMock Isolator allows you to fake calls to SharePoint so that you can run unit testing against the SharePoint object model with actually having SharePoint installed or going to a specific instance of SharePoint 2010.  The full version (i.e. not the SharePoint only version of TypeMoch Isolator) also allows you to do create isolation mocks of you code (see Rhino Mocks is a good Isolator Framework).  So pretty useful for testing SharePoint or Entity Framework.  You simply mock out the expected behaviour and don't need to test the Entity Framework by connecting to it.

Tip:  You can use this exact same technique to test MOSS.
Tip: TypeMock needs a separate build server licence from the developer licences.  You can use the full product that includes the ability to do SharePoint testing or just the SharePoint TypeMock isolator.  As of 6 March 2011 the SharePoint edition costs 249 euros per year.  Licencing is expensive especially for large dev teams with multiple build servers but the returns are good if your organisation buys into TDD.
Tip: The SharePoint edition is fine for testing SharePoint calls but you can't mock your own .NET methods so you can't simply use a factory pattern and then mock your entire .NET method call as was shown to me by Ketul Patel (@Pateketu).

Objectives: Create a unit test that uses TypeMock Isolator that mocks the call to SharePoint.
TypeMock to Isolate a method call:
Add 4 reference for nUnit and TypeMock frameworks.
Add a reference to the library you are testing in my case "MagicBall.dll".
Create a new unit test, I isolate a call to the method "GetSPQuestions" and return a list of strings (this has allowed me to override the normal call that would be made to SharePoint).
My business logic for the "Magic 8 Ball" is shown below.  The key take away is I fake the method call GetSPQuestions() using TypeMock so it doesn't try access SharePoint.  This allows me to test my business logic using SharePoint's object model.
TypeMock to Isolate a SharePoint call:
The previous technique works if the return data is not SharePoint objects, so TypeMock allows you to mock up SharePoint objects.  Whereas this example shows how to unit test by faking SharePoint objects.
  • As you can see the code fakes the SPSite Object, then we fake the "Contracts" SPList object (fakeContractList). 
  • At this point all properties inside the objects are null.  So our list would simple return a list with no objects.
  • The next step is to create 3 fake list items that are added to the "fakeContractList".
The code below shows the business logic/code of my "Magic 8 Ball":
The method QuestionSPList() has child methods that use SharePoint objects.  This example directly fakes the SharePoint object model to allow for unit testing.
Summary:  I prefer to build my calls to the SharePoint API or any external API's in a low level private service method.  Then all I need to do it stub out the entire method as shown in the 1st example.  Faking the SharePoint object model using TypeMock is a good option for testing SharePoint reliant code. 

More Info:
Paul Hunt has done 3 great blogs on Andrew Woodward's SPRetreat so this will give you another viewpoint on unit testing for SharePoint 2010.

Andrew Woodward has a codeplex project (SharePoint Magic 8 Ball) that will give you tons of example code on unit testing.


Sunday 6 March 2011

Unit Testing for SharePoint - Part 1

Overview:  I am not an expert in Test Driven Development (TDD) but the SharePoint Retreat in London has made me think about using this approach for SharePoint 2010 development.  There are various tools to help you perform TDD however, these 2 posts show the approach I am most comfortable with thanks to Andrew Woodward. 

This whole article is based on Andrew's session and I really would recommend to any serious development team to get Andrew in to do some upfront consulting and potentially training.  Upfront costs and his experience would definately be quickly recovered.  If you have already decided to use a TDD get Andrew in to get you dev team up to a good standard with TDD for SharePoint, anyway enough of my sycophantic
dialogue.

Tools:
  • Visual Studio (VS) 2010 any edition;
  • NUnit - preferable to MSTest for SharePoint dev
  • TestDriven.Net (optional)
  • ReSharper (optional)
Objectives:
Part 1 focuses on using setting up a basic "Magic 8 Ball" to unit test the business logic using nUnit. 

Tip: using coding Katas (really good approach to training, this is the 1st time I've used them and they actually really work) to get a full unit testing system working. 
Tip: Write the unit test and then write the code to fix the test.

At the SharePoint retreat, each session started with a:
  1. Review of the last sessions code (if appicable),
  2. Followed by an overview of what will be the next bit of coding logic (instructor lead teaching/demo exercise),
  3. Break into a new pair programming team to code (old code is throw away and a fresh set of code is started that includes all the exercise from all the previous sessions), and
  4. Loop - Back to step 1 (Review each pairs code).
In this post I am describing the 1st session, what you are trying to do is setup unit testing and write a couple of tests for you "Magic 8 Ball". 

Setup
1. Open VS2010, create a new solution file (MagicPost1.Sln).
2. Create 2 new C# class projects, the 1st project contains the business logic code (BOL project) and the 2nd project contains the unit tests (BOLTest project).
3. Change the default class on the BOL project to Ball and the default class on the BOLTest project to BallTest.
4. Add 3 references to the BolTest project. 
All 4 steps are shown below:

dll reference locations:
\Program Files (x86)\NUnit 2.5.9\bin\net-2.0\lib\nunit.core.dll
\Program Files (x86)\NUnit 2.5.9\bin\net-2.0\framework\nunit.framework.dll

5.  Add the basic testing structure to you BallTest.cs code as shown below:
6. Add this basic code snippet to your Visual Studio code snippets (Resharper has better code snippet support).  7. Write you 1st unit test (the simpler the better) as show below:
8. Build your project to ensure it compiles. 9. Comptete the test code as shown below and run the test.
Tip: Strictly following TDD principals your test should fail and then you write code to fix it in the BOL code.

More Info:
Andrew Woodward's codeplex project on the magic 8 Ball which provides the code you can use to build the magic 8 Ball with TDD.
Here is a slide deck to a presentation on the Magic 8 Ball TDD project.

Next Post:
Part 2 of the series looks at testing SharePoint using Type Moch Isolator.

Saturday 5 March 2011

SharePoint Retreat Saturday

SharePoint Retreat London 2011, Saturday, March 05, 2011 London held by Andrew Woodward (@) & Wes Hackett.  A brilliant day, if you get a chance to go to 1 of these you should.  Met some good SP people and got great tips & pointers.  The bonus was I won a Type Mock Isolator licence.

Andrew gave a clear example that we worked on throughout the day, enjoyed the unit testing with nUnit.  I'm not totally sold on the TypeMoch as I feel like I'm testing the SharePoint API but it does increase code coverage.    
More Info:
http://spretreatlondon11.eventbrite.com/
Paul Hunt (@cimares) has done 3 great posts on the SPRetreat event.  Paul has transcribed the sessions extremely well and with good examples delivered in a step by step approach.
Update 10/08/2011: Unit testing Guidance