Beantown .NET Moves to NERD on April 2nd

BeantownDotNet

Some breaking news for .NET developers in the greater Boston area - the Beantown .NET User Group, organized by MVP Ben Day, is moving across the Charles to Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge!

This will give NERD it’s first .NET-focused user group and gives Beantown .NET plenty of room to grow.

OMD AerialThe first meeting at NERD is on April 2nd from 6:00-8:00 (directions) and should be a fun chance to hear plenty of views and practices:

The Unit Testing Throwdown

 

Oddly, there seems to be almost no consensus about unit testing. Lots of developers think that unit testing is dumb. Plenty are ambivalent. Some love it.  Even among those devs who are already sold on unit testing, there’s no consensus. Sure, we might agree about some of the helpful things to do like using the Repository pattern, interface-driven design, and mocking frameworks but ask 10 developers how they’d unit test something and you’ll get 30 different answers.

 

Well, enough with the armchair quarterbacking. It’s on! You don’t like how I write my tests? I want to know why. Come show me how you do it. Don’t like unit tests at all? Come tell us why. Got some killer technique?  Got an opinion about how much logic you put in each test method? Tonight’s the night to bring out The Awesome.

 

The plan is to show code samples, gather around the whiteboard, and by the end (hopefully) sort out some Real-Life Best Practices for unit testing.

 

BTW, if you have unit testing topics that you think we should put on the agenda, email them to benday@benday.com.

See you there!

-Chris