TDD with ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Question

Where can I find a good tutorial on TDD with ASP.NET MVC 1.0? I'd prefer a video tutorial but a text tutorial would be fine as well. I have a new project starting soon and I want to start off on the right foot.

Answer 1

Check out here. MVC store front is highly recommended.

Answer 2

The Storefront Videos from ASP.NET are a must watch series.

Answer 3

Any tutorial on TDD will be helpful for MVC. I've been doing TDD for sometime and found that it was a natural transition in MVC. There are a few peculiarities that I have found that need to be addressed.

1. You often need to mock up the HttpContext, which means that you need to assign a ControllerContext to the controller after it's created as that's the only way to inject the mock. The context will be used to provide the Session, Request, and Response objects in the controller (also mock them). New HttpContextBase, HttpSessionStateBase, ... classes make this much easier to do.

2. Because of (1), invest some time in putting together some helper classes in a separate class library that can be used by all of your test projects. These helper classes should contain methods that provide configurable (or multiple methods to provide specific configurations) of the mocked contexts. This will help keep your tests compact.

3. Use and assign a ValueProvider for testing methods that accept parameters if you aren't using ModelBinding (with corresponding parameters in the signature) for a controller action. This will allow you to use TryUpdateModel/UpdateModel without adding code to your controller to get data from the Request into those methods.

4. Use a mocking framework -- if that isn't obvious from above. It will be so much easier to write your tests if you mock out the dependencies. Writing your own mocks, IMO, is not worth it, though I know others don't share that opinion. I guess this isn't unique to MVC, but I thought I'd mention it.

5. Set up a separate set of tests that use reflection to test that appropriate attributes with appropriate properties are getting set on your methods. MVC makes heavy use of attributes for security and other cross-cutting aspects. These need to be tested as well.

Answer 4

I thought that Rob Conery's 'ASP.NET MVC Storefront Starter Kit' http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc-videos/#MVCStorefrontStarterKit were great for demonstrating TDD with ASP.NET MVC.