December 2010 Developer Dinner: How to Simplify Unit Testing with Pex and Moles

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Microsoft Research has produced two tools to dramatically simplify the construction of unit tests.  We will look at Moles, a framework and Visual Studio add-in that helps to isolate your code from external dependencies.  With Moles you can replace any .Net method with a delegate.  Next we will examine Pex, a Visual Studio add-in that automatically generates unit tests for you.  Pex analyzes your code, looking at, for example, if statements, assertions and operations that throw exceptions, to create inputs that try to achieve 100% code coverage.

James Wren is Senior Consultant with Microsoft Services and has designed custom software for a variety of clients including the New York City Police Department, Department of Defense, and the Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle Program.  He is a strong advocate for building testable, modular software and has lectured within Microsoft and at the University of Maryland.