Jan Schreuder on .Net

TechEd - Unit Testing Best Practices With Visual Studio 2005 Team System

This session proved that it's impossible for all sessions to be interesting. Now don't get me wrong here. There were a lot of delegates at this session, and for a lot of them it is probably interesting. But I was expecting something completely different.

As the title suggested, I was expecting to here best practices for developing unit tests. After about 20 minutes into the session, all I saw was how to create a unit test in Visual Studio Team System Suite. Not really mind bloggling or rocket science. But that's not my point. I had only heard two things of interest to me:

1. When do you write unit tests.
   1. Before writing code: In Testdriven Development, Agile or XP scenarios.
   2. After writing code: Quality Assurance, bug discovery, regression tests
2. KIS(s). Keep It Simple (stupid). Which was accompanied with the remark that copy & paste is usually bad, but not when you write unit tests.

I gave up after hearing that. Too bad, but when you're tired after a long day at TechEd, you need to be stimulated. Not put to sleep. Still, this was the first session I walked away from. And probably the last.

Tomorrow, Friday November 10, will be the last day of TechEd.