It’s only a few days ago since we released the first version of Fluent Assertions, and we already have a new release. The reason for this is that the first release was just the public release of an internal set of classes that we’ve been using for a year or so. But this week, we've worked hard to add some important missing features that we really needed, and also improve resilience against illegal arguments such as an empty collection or null. Release 1.1 includes the following improvements.

• All dependencies on MSTest assemblies have been removed. So assertions will work with all testing frameworks.
• Added support for Silverlight
• Improved the verification messages around assertion of collections so that you don't need any debugging to figure out what went wrong.
• Added object.Should().BeAssignableTo()
• Added object.Should().Satisfy() to verify against a lambda or delegate.
• Added extension methods on an Action or Action<T> which allows better support for the AAA syntax. We've rewritten a large portion of the framework's unit tests and it definitely improves unit test maintenance.
• Added a ValueOf property to the exception assertions syntax that allows chaining additional Should()s on the properties of the exception.

You can download it here. The documentation can be found here.

My Dutch article on User Stories in Team Foundation Server 2010 is now available online at the SDN site. Read it over here. I will translate it to English soon.

In essence, Test Driven Development (TDD) is a practice in which the interface and the behavior of a component is designed while writing a unit test. In other words, you typically start writing a test case and define the exact members, behavior and names on the fly. In fact, the word Test in TDD is misleading at the least, because the whole practice is really a design methodology that promotes creating testable loosely coupled software. And since this is going to be a difficult endeavor without applying the right design principles, you usually end up with a maintainable and extensible system which by incidence also includes a high code coverage. Without TDD, these same goals are very difficult to reach.

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About a year ago, me and some other colleagues started to create a simple framework for verifying the outcome of unit tests in a more natural way. Martin Opdam already blogged about this in June and since then we have been adding some minor features.

A few weeks ago I discovered the much more powerful SharpTestEx and decided to drop further development on our own extensions. I do like some of SharpTestEx’s features, but I found some limitations that causes me to reconsider. Last weekend, I decided to reinstate our extensions under the name of Fluent Assertions and release them on CodePlex.

So why do I think it is better? First of all, because we only have one level of indirection (the Should() extension method), it is much easier to add you own domain-specific extensions. This is something we do often and should be very trivial.

Secondly, all our verification methods accept a phrase stating the reason of the expected outcome such as “because it is a required field” that is used to generate a clear and comprehensive error message when the verification fails. This should help you from staying out of the debugger hell when a test fails.

As I’m writing this we are already working on the next release which should be available in the next few days.

As promised, you can review the slides from yesterday’s DotNed event on Software Development Practices from here, and you can download the source code from here.

Notice that you need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, the Silverlight 4 Beta tools and the Silverlight 4 Beta Toolkit November 2009 to run it. Since the Visual Studio 2010 RC build does not support Silverlight 4 yet, you can’t use to run the demo.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m looking back at an awesome DotNED event in Doorn. The location was very nice, the audience was a blast, and my two fellow speakers Jonne Kats and Peter Hesseling did a great job.  Thanks to everybody for being there!

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While working on my demo code for my full-day talk on Software Development Practices in Practice I was a bit ambitious and introduced both Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Apart from the fact that the preparation caused a bit too much of my social live, I ran in some things I don’t really like and hopefully will be improved in next versions of the WCF RIA Services.

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