Paul Hadfield

Following on from my original post of learning how to put JavaScript together it's been a really productive week. Have I managed to write JavaScript that's easy to test? No, but I've wrapped up some reasonably complex logic into a component that can have some of it's functionality tested!At the moment I've settled on QUnit as my JS unit testing framework and have a couple of tests verifying the default values of exposed properties - these are currently exposed as functions as I've wrapped up the variables in a closure to make them read only. Not sure if JavaScript even has the concept of a read only property in a form similar to C#. When calling the component in test conditions I've also been overwriting functions on the injected underscore library that failed due to a null/undefined reference - so not really mocking yet. The first issue I ran into was that I was pre-compiling the templates and these were defined inside script blocks of the calling ASP.N…

If you're using WIX and you're adding components to the product file by hand then you've probably found yourself creating and cutting/pasting a lot of GUIDs which can be a real pain and productivity killer. There is the "Create GUID" menu option under tools but that still requires calling and then cutting / pasting. The other day one of other members on our team came up with these steps to create a macro that will create and insert a new GUID and can be bound to a key board short cut.Go to Tools – Macros – Macro Explorer and paste the following into a module:Sub InsertGuid() Dim objTextSelection As TextSelection objTextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection(), EnvDTE.TextSelection) objTextSelection.Text = System.Guid.NewGuid.ToString("D").ToUpperInvariant End Sub Then assign it a keyboard shortcut through Tools – Environment/Keyboard, you can generate a GUID in-place with a simple keyboard shortcut.No more copy/paste

After many years of trial and error / practise I feel fairly happy that I can write clean, testable .NET / C# code, which is free of any external dependencies which traditionally make unit testing harder. It's fair to say that I'm convert to TDD; having implemented it on two separate commercial projects and seen the benefits of the improved maintainability of the code base over time.But what about Javascript? Thanks to Selenium and Specflow the functionality of those websites is pretty well tested and by default that includes any JavaScript that may be referenced in the UI tests that are run. But that's not the same as having clean testable JavaScript. Those websites have typically included a mixture of JavaScript defined in-line as well as held separately within JS files. Most functionality has been provided by individual functions attached to events and any communication introduced by coupling of functions and/or attaching attributes to FORM elements. AJAX calls an…