.NET Tip: Testing Private Fields

If you're interested in this tip, skip the next section -- the next section is just a long-winded explanation of the most recent occasion when I felt I had to use these tools. You can tell, by the length of my apology, that I'm uncomfortable with this tip.

An Apology
Here's my problem: I have a data repository that retrieves data and, after returning the data to the client, holds the data in a cache so that the next request for the same data will run much faster. The cache is a List of objects declared as a field/class-level variable ... and that field is declared as private because the cache is no business of the client and shouldn't be accessible. I should be able to test my repository without considering the cache, right? Either my test gets the right answer or it doesn't and I shouldn't care if the private cache was involved.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/03/20180 comments

Controlling Your Visual Studio Default Window Layout

Starting about a week ago, whenever I opened a solution in Visual Studio, Solution Explorer did not appear. Instead, the right-hand side of the Visual Studio window was completely occupied -- top to bottom -- by the Properties window. I have no idea why this happened. I like the Properties window as much as the next developer, but I want it stacked below Solution Explorer (What can I say? I'm a traditionalist). Not matter what configuration I left Visual Studio in, the next time I opened it, Solution Explorer was gone. The solution was to restore to my default layout.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/27/20180 comments

Controlling Model Binding in ASP.NET Core

It seems to me like magic when model binding takes data from the client and loads it correctly into the properties of the Customer object in the parameter to this method:

public ActionResult UpdateCustomer(Customer cust)
{

However, sometimes model binding doesn't do what I'd like. For example, let's say my Customer object looks like this:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/17/20180 comments

Adding Your Own Files to Your Visual Studio Solution

Despite the file extensions you see in the Add Existing Item dialog box, Visual Studio isn't limited to working with specific kinds of files. If you have some file that you want to include in your project, you can add it in Solution Explorer. If you want to be able to edit it in Visual Studio, you just need to associate its file extension with one of Visual Studio's editors.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 08/07/20180 comments

Switching Your Xamarin Project to Standard Class Projects

There are lots of differences between using a Standard Class/Portable Class Library (PCL) and Shared projects in a Xamarin solution. However, the most obvious one appears when you open any XAML file in a Shared project: In a Standard Class library you'll get IntelliSense support; in a Shared Project you won't get any IntelliSense support and virtually every element in your XAML file will be flagged as an error (though, fortunately, your solution will still compile).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 08/06/20180 comments

Organizing Test Cases

In addition to the TestInitialize and TestMethod attributes that you're used to using when creating automated tests, there's also a TestCategory attribute that you'll find useful as the number of your tests starts to get overwhelming.

Effectively, using TestCategory lets you create a group of tests using any arbitrary system you want. This allows you to create (and run!) groups of tests that you feel are related without having to run every test in a class, a project or a solution. These could be, for examples, all the tests in all your test classes that involve your Customer factory or all the tests that use your repository class.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 08/01/20180 comments

Eliminate Code and Add Functionality with Fody Attributes

Fody is such a cool NuGet package that it's a shame it's only been mentioned on this site once and in passing. Fody handles the problem you have all the time: crosscutting concerns. A crosscutting concern is something that happens in many places in your application but not in every place.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 07/23/20180 comments

The Simplest Way to Create an Asynchronous Method

You like the idea of using await and async to execute asynchronous methods, and you've got a method that you'd like to turn into an asynchronous method ... but you haven't called any native asynchronous methods within your method and you're not sure what to do to make your method "awaitable." There is an easy solution: Pass the result of your method to the Task object's static FromResult method, which will load the Task object's Result property (which, really, is what all that async/await processing depends on).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 07/23/20180 comments

Use JavaScript Code from One File in Another File with IntelliSense

If you have a JavaScript (*.js) file containing code, it's not unusual for your code to reference code held in another JavaScript file. If you're using more recent versions of Visual Studio, you'll find that the editor knows about all the JavaScript code in your project and will provide some IntelliSense support as you type in your JavaScript code (not as much support as you'd get with TypeScript, of course).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 07/23/20180 comments

Overriding Controller Authorization in ASP.NET MVC

You have a Contoller class called Adminstration that only admins should use. There's about a dozen Action methods in the Controller class and they all should only be accessed by users in the Admin or SuperAdmin roles. Rather than put an Authorize attribute on each method, you can put just one on the Controller class, like this:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 07/18/20180 comments

The New Cross-Platform Standard: Version 2.0

Microsoft has always had a plan to support cross-platform development using the .NET Framework. For the longest time, the plan was for you to create a Portable Class Library (PCL) -- any API you used from a PCL was supposed to work on any .NET supported platform.

If you did create a PCL project, you were given a list of platforms and asked to check off which ones you wanted to run on. After checking off your choices, what you could access in your library was the intersection of the .NET Framework APIs supported on each of those platforms. Fundamentally, that meant the more platforms you checked off, the less of the .NET Framework you got to use (in fact, some combinations would take out whole versions of Visual Studio).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/26/20180 comments

Dealing with Read-Only Files

It's easy to miss that you've opened a read-only file in Visual Studio: When you open a file you can't change, a tiny little lock icon appears on the tab of the editor window to the right of the file's name. By default, Visual Studio won't even tell you that you can't change the file until -- after you've made all your changes, of course -- you try to save the file. Only then do you get the bad news with a dialog that gives you three choices:

Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/20/20180 comments