NUnit Extension Methods

I've always used NUnit for testing code so it's naturally the framework I'm most familiar with (I haven't used anything else). I learned unit testing using the classic Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual) methods. Although, I was finding my tests slightly confusing to read - I sometimes can't remember which comes first, expected or actual.

More recently I've been getting into v2.5 including the new asserts - Assert.That(actual, Is.EqualTo(expected)). I think this makes a lot of sense and I often find myself using Assert.That most of the time just because it makes sense.

Recently, a coworker created a few extension methods that I'm finding quite handy:

public static void ShouldBe(this object @this, object expected) {
    Assert.AreEqual((dynamic)expected, (dynamic)@this);
}
public static void ShouldNotBe(this object @this, object expected) {
    Assert.AreNotEqual((dynamic)expected, (dynamic)@this);
}
public static void ShouldBeNull(this object @this) {
    Assert.IsNull(@this);
}
public static void ShouldNotBeNull(this object @this) {
    Assert.IsNotNull(@this);
}

I've completely fallen in love with how this reads: actual.ShouldBe(expected). It also makes me giggle to do actual.ShouldBeNull() (Don't you love extension methods?). This makes unit testing so easy...

The internal secrets of Git

Thursday night I attended a lecture at the Boulder Linux user's group called Unlocking the Secrets of Git by Tom, one of the co-founders of Github. This was extremely eye-opening. Up until now I had viewed Git as simply a distributed version control system. Tom showed us how to manipulate Git's internal file format and demonstrated that Git is actually a filesystem in userspace with built-in versioning and synchronization. He demonstrated how, by storing a SHA1 hash of files, Git is (1) extremely fast at comparing files and (2) doesn't actually care about the file name - it just cares about the contents of files. This is important when you're renaming files - the filename is generally unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Tom also showed us several open source projects that build upon the concept of Git as a filesystem. One was a highly efficient backup system. Another is a static site generator. There were many more. The point here is that Git is destined to be not just version control; it will be a feature-complete platform for anything that requires a filesystem with versioning and synchronization.

The critical component to the success of Git as a plaform is libgit2, a C library for interacting with Git. The reason why this is the critical component is that many people had been re-creating the functionality of Git. By combining this functionality into a library, the logic only has to be written once and can be used by everyone else. The other reason why this is a critical component is because libgit2 is being released under a permissive license that allows it to be easily used by many other people and projects without getting into any legal snafu's.

Most importantly, Thursday night I realized that the tech community of Boulder is so complex and complete, I should never get bored here. I haven't lived here for a full six months yet but already I feel like I can't leave this city.