The Gherkin DSL defines data tables as a way of passing a list of values to a step definition. Gherkin tables use the pipe character | to delimit column names and values. They’re easy to read and understand by both business and technical people. While they work great in Gherkin, tables don’t translate well to strongly typed .NET languages. They are converted to an instance of the Table type in SpecFlow bindings. Read more

SpecFlow is hands down my favorite testing tool. I’ve been blogging about it since 2013 covering mostly advanced topics. In this post, I’ll go back to the beginning and briefly cover the basics to give you an idea of what it can do. What is SpecFlow? SpecFlow is a tool that allows you to: Define, manage, and automate human-readable acceptance tests in .NET. Enable BDD with easy to understand tests. Read more

The C# language has been around for over 15 years. It started off as a Java ripoff and evolved into its own language. Some parts of the language I use daily: enumerators, generics, async/await. Other parts lurk in the shadows until the rare moment when I need to put them to use. One such part is overflow checking for integral operations. Compiler Option By default, integral operations are not checked for overflows either by the C# compiler or at runtime. Read more

Selenium is a library used to automate web browsers. It uses a common web driver interface, and each web browser, Chrome, Firefox, IE, has a corresponding implementation that takes advantage of the browser’s native API. I don’t have much experience with browser automation. In fact, I try to avoid it as much as possible in favor of testing at the unit and service level. Tests running through the browser tend to be brittle due to the non-deterministic nature of web pages. Read more

In the latest versions of the .NET Framework, asynchronous work is represented by the Task class. A task is similar to a future or promise in other languages. You can create one in many ways the most common being Task.Run(). The result of a task is exposed by the Task.Result property. If the work is complete, then the property immediately returns a value; otherwise, it blocks until the operation is finished. Read more

In the fall of 1999, I dropped my plans to attend grad school to embark on a career in IT. The industry has changed considerably since then mostly for the better. In fact I’ve never been more excited to be a software developer. As part of a personal retrospective on my career, below are my thoughts on the top six shifts in IT. By a “shift” I mean a change that has profoundly affected the way developers go about their daily work. Read more