Now that you probably have a good grasp on the basics of unit testing, you probably want to see some examples that put all of this knowledge together. This chapter will do just that; I built a little simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application that allows us to withdraw money from an account, deposit money on an account and transfer money to another account. I kept everything very simple, ignoring lots of best-practices to keep the unit testing as easy as possible. More...

In order to be able to test your software without applying many dirty hacks, you have to embrace a couple of architectural patterns that allow you to isolate the pieces of code that you want to test. I will explain a few principles that are crucial if you want to build good, testable software. More...

One of my favorite design patterns is the 'repository pattern'. That's why I decided to dedicate a complete blog post to it. Using the repository pattern in your application can yield a lot of benefits, such as improved testability, easier ways to implement caching and transactions, avoidance of code duplication and it allows you to replace the data source easier (although that probably won't happen too often). More...

During my internship at sound of data I had to build a management interface that enabled the user to view the push messages our platform (IRIS) sent to our clients. The amount of messages we are sending on a daily base are immense, so I had to come up with a good way to display this data pretty much on the fly. I ran into a lot of issues (all of which I've fixed), but the main problem was MySQL's InnoDB very poor COUNT() performance when iterating through ~2 million lines of test data I've inserted into the database. I found a nice work-around for this problem that speeded up querying the amount of rows in the database by a factor ~million. More...