I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the current short-comings of SpecsFor.  While I’m pretty happy with the end-user experience, the internals have become complex and confused.  I’m also encountering new testing scenarios as I’m writing more and more full integration specs with SpecsFor, and I’m finding that SpecsFor isn’t able to help with those scenarios in the ways I would like for it to.  I have some ideas for SpecsFor 3.0 that I think will simplify the core while also making SpecsFor more flexible and more powerful.

More...

Tags:

In all of the SpecsFor.Mvc examples I’ve posted so far, I’ve omitted one common cross-cutting requirement of web applications: authentication!  Most web apps have some sort of authentication, and we need to be able to test our core application logic without this cross-cutting concern getting in the way.  SpecsFor.Mvc makes it easy to achieve exactly that, as I’ll show you in this post.

More...

Tags:

So far in the “Using SpecsFor.Mvc" series, I’ve shown you how to navigate using the strongly-typed API and how to fill out and submit forms.  In part three of my series, I’ll show you how to create automated acceptance tests for your ASP.NET MVC application that verify expected data is displayed on a page. 

More...

Tags:

Beginning with version 2.0, ASP.NET MVC has shipped with a set of templates for both displaying and editing data.  These templates are buried within the System.Web.Mvc assembly.  While you can override them outright, you cannot easily extend them since they’re locked down.  The new MvcDisplayTemplates NuGet package fixes this problems.

More...

Tags:

A new release of SpecsFor.Mvc is now live on NuGet.  This release includes one simple, but important, enhancement as well as a few other minor improvements.

More...

Tags:

This is part two of my series on Using SpecsFor.Mvc to write awesome automated acceptance tests for your ASP.NET MVC application.  In this post, we’ll look at navigating around your app from SpecsFor.Mvc and at how to locate, populate, and submit forms. 

More...

Tags:

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally shipped version 1.0 of SpecsFor.Mvc last week.  There’s a slew of features in this release.  Enough, in fact, for a series of blog posts.  Hence this post!  This is the first of many covering what you can do with SpecsFor.Mvc 1.0.  Read on, and I’ll show you everything that’s in the box!

More...

Tags:

It’s late, so this will be a short post, but SpecsFor.Mvc version 1.0 has been released.  It took me a lot longer to wrap this up than I expected, but there are a lot more features in the 1.0 release than I had originally planned.  Overall, I’m very pleased with the end-user experience of the framework, though admittedly the internals of the project are in need of some cleanup and refactoring.  I have a lot of content planned that will highlight what SpecsFor.Mvc can do, but for now, this short video will have to do.  Be sure to watch the video in HD!  Enjoy!

Tags:

SpecsFor makes it very easy to bolt on your own conventions, create your own base classes, and extend its behavior to support your specific testing needs.  I’m working on a project that’s built on LINQ to SQL, and I wanted to start creating integration tests around our stored procedures and views.  Here’s the base class I made to handle establishing a database connection, loading in “seed data,” and then cleaning up after each set of specs once they’re finished.

More...

Tags:

Well, I missed my goal of having the 1.0 version of SpecsFor.Mvc available by the end of 2011, but it was not for lack of trying.  I’ve been dog-fooding it on a mobile web app (my first), and that’s resulted in a number of changes and improvements.  I’m quite pleased with how things are shaping up, but I’d like some feedback from someone who isn’t me on the changes.

More...

Tags: