Workflow Foundation and Unit Testing
Most of the presentations you have probably seen on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), including the one I gave during the recent Northeast Roadshow, focus on the abstraction of business activities and the automatic management of the instance lifecycle by the WF runtime. Sounds great in terms of enabling you to focus on specifics of the business domain, but what about testing? Is all this infrastructure easily mockable? What's the best way to plan your workflow projects to account for unit testing?
This question indeed came up during my presentation in Augusta, Maine, and I just wanted to follow up with some links that will likely be of interest to those of you who may be wondering the same thing.
MSDN Magazine, Nov. 2008 - Unit Testing Workflow and Activities, by Matt Milner
TDD and Windows Workflow Foundation, Ron Jacobs blog
As I was looking up the links above, I also found that the January 2009 MSDN Magazine looks to have a couple of great articles right up the Workflow alley as well:
- WCF and WF Services in the .NET Framework 4.0 and Dublin
- ASP.NET Workflow: Web Apps that Support Long-Running Operations
Given the 18+ inches of snow on the ground outside my house, it's a great time to curl up by the fire and catch up on my reading - how about you?