Keyvan Nayyeri

Finally the fourth part of my article series entitled Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ has been published on ASP Alliance.

In the fourth part of this series, Keyvan talks about the unit testing concepts related to the MVC pattern and how Microsoft has adapted these concepts for its ASP.NET MVC framework. He shows these principles and the process that should be followed to unit test an ASP.NET MVC application.

The fourth part is all about unit testing principles in MVC pattern and ASP.NET MVC pattern and covers some theories that you need to know to be able to use the MVC pattern and ASP.NET MVC.

This part doesn't deal with KBlog at all and goes in some details about a progress that you need to follow in order to unit test an ASP.NET MVC application.

This part starts with a short introduction and an overview unit testing and TDD and then moves the discussion to the necessity of MVC pattern and ASP.NET MVC from the testing perspective. At this point it discusses about the requirements of testing in MVC and the necessity of a good level of abstraction and isolation in MVC applications and how this requirement is achieved in ASP.NET MVC framework. After this, you read about the testing process in MVC pattern in general and some changes in ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 testing features.

You may ask that why I didn't talk about views in this fourth part as I wrote in the third part? Actually I thought that it's better to talk about unit testing stuff at this point and test the application then step into views because it shows the effect of separation between view, model and controller and its effect on ease of testing the application. So not only in this part but also in the fifth part I talk about unit testing then will move to views.

Of course, this part was going to be published last week but Steve was away to MVP summit and spring Dev Connections and couldn't make this happen. I'm also going to start my work on the fifth part that should be public in the next three weeks.

For those who want to read the previous parts, here is a list:

• Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 1 (Introduction)
• Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 2 (Controller)
• Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 3 (Data Model)

It's worthwhile to point that Simone Chiaretta is also doing an excellent job on writing another articles series for DotNetSlackers about ASP.NET MVC. Don't miss his great stuff there. So far he has published two parts as an introduction and about testing the MVC applications.