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If your code does File IO, such as reading text from a file, then it’s dependent on the file system. This is an external dependency. In order to make the unit tests fast and reliable, you can mock out the external dependencies. To mock out the file system dependency, you can wrap the File IO … Read more
You can use Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) to load assemblies at runtime. This is an alternative to implementing dynamic assembly loading with a more manual approach (like using AssemblyLoadContext). Here’s an example of using MEF to load an instance of IMessageProcessorPlugin from some assembly located in the C:\Plugins directory: MEF looks for exported types in … Read more
When you’re unit testing code that uses the console IO methods, you’ll need a way to automate the input and a way to capture the output. There are two ways to do this: Redirect the console IO. Wrap the console IO method calls and mock out the wrapper. In this article, I’ll show how to … Read more
When a background service throws an exception in ExecuteAsync() and stops running, nothing happens. No errors are logged, and the ASP.NET service continues to run. What if you want to stop the ASP.NET service when the background service crashes? To do that, you’ll need to handle exceptions in the background service and call IHostApplicationLifetime.StopApplication(), like … Read more
The options pattern is an indirect way to dependency inject settings into a registered service. If you’re using code that implements the options pattern, then you’re required to supply an IOptions<T> object. For example, let’s say you’re using the MovieService class and it has the following constructor: This requires you to supply the IOptions<MovieSettings> parameter. … Read more
Let’s say you have a background service called DatabaseLoggerService. It runs as a hosted background service and logs messages to the database. It has the following definition: You want your controllers to use this for logging. They don’t need to know about the concrete DatabaseLoggerService class, and they don’t need to know they are actually … Read more
When the built-in dependency injection functionality is trying to create a type, it tries to resolve all of the constructor parameters. If it can’t resolve one of the parameters, it’ll throw a variation of one of these exceptions: InvalidOperationException: Unable to resolve service for type <Type Name> while attempt to activate <Type Name>. ArgumentException: Cannot … Read more
The key to unit testing an ApiController class is to mock out all of its dependencies, including the controller’s HttpContext property, like this: If the controller method you’re testing uses anything from the HttpContext, then you’ll want to swap in your own value. Otherwise HttpContext will be null and you’ll get a NullReferenceException. Fortunately Microsoft … Read more
Testing code with a dependency on an event can be tricky. You may be tempted to directly unit test the event handling method. However, that doesn’t prove that code under test is listening for the event. It’s better to really fire the event, and then test side effects of the event handling method. Firing the … Read more
Server-Sent Events (SSE) allow a client to subscribe to messages on a server. The server pushes new messages to the client as they happen. This is an alternative to the client polling the server for new messages. In this article I’ll show how to implement the messaging system shown in the diagram below. This uses … Read more
