Recently, I noticed a nice pattern in the Nerd Dinner application. Nerd Dinner uses strongly typed view model classes to pass data from a controller to a view. This pattern provides you with a convenient way of representing complex view data. Note: If you haven’t downloaded the Nerd Dinner sample ASP.NET MVC application yet, you really should. It is a really easy to understand sample application that you can use as a great introduction to ASP.NET MVC. You can download it from the http://www.ASP.net/mvc page. In an ASP.NET MVC application, you pass data from a controller to a view by using view...

The motivation for this blog entry is to explain the nature and purpose of the tests used in Test-Driven Development. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the expression TDD test to refer to the type of test used in the context of Test-Driven Development. The goal of this blog entry is to clarify the relationship among TDD tests, unit tests, and acceptance tests. TDD Tests are not Unit Tests Let’s start with the distinction between TDD tests and unit tests. On the surface, TDD tests are very similar to unit tests. This is not surprising, since you use a unit testing framework such...

Recently, I had a disagreement with a colleague over the correct way to do Test-Driven Development. This is an important disagreement because it affects the design of the ASP.NET MVC framework. According to my co-worker (let’s call him Tad), there is no difference between Test-First Development and Test-After Development “except when you write your unit tests.” Tad is a practitioner and proponent of Test-After Development. When you practice Test-After Development, you write application code first and then you write a unit test that tests the application code. From the perspective of someone who practices Test-Driven Development, this gets things backwards. I...