Talking about how to best organize your code, moving from school-work to work-work, the future of Silverlight, and (as always) lots of poo-pooing.

We gather around the Festivus pole this holiday season and before we get into the Airing of Grievances, we discuss our favorite tools. No, not people. Actual tools. Srsly.

I figured this title was appropriate considering it's been a month since our last episode.  We've all been incredibly busy so we hope you've been patient waiting and maybe, just maybe it was worth the wait!  We've crammed quite a bit into this episode which is all about testing.  Follow the more link to see the show notes for this particular episode and don't forget to click one of the share buttons there to let all your friends know about the podcast!In this episode we're primarily talking about Unit Testing.  While that's the focus of the podcast, we also touch on other types of testing so you'll get a basic understanding of the fundamental differences between the types of tests.  Just keep in mind - the testing we're talking about is writing code to test your code.  It's not someone going through and clicking on items in your UI to make sure they work.  We're talking about code testing code to preemptively find problems before they become big problems.

It's the holiday season and we would be remiss if we didn't mention our favorite games right now.

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

@TrentApple and loldot both shared the ExpressionVisitor.
Click here to see an example of the ExpressionVisitor class

Ray wanted to try an anti-SQL database.  Ended up with db4o.  Unfortunately it looks like it may be dead.
Here's the link to db4o...
Maybe do a podcast on object to database storage.  Database mappers of various sorts.

Lewis wants us to create a list of our recommended tools.  Check back here in the future and we'll have a link to the post we create that lists out our favorite developer tools.  Everything from command line replacement tools, comparison tools, text editors, etc.
Favorite tools of 2014 Coming Soon!

Marcus wants to hear a podcast on Reactive Extensions.  We may be getting an expert on the show to speak about this stuff....

Testing in general

Several types of testing (not an exhaustive list):

For a single method that you want to test, you may create a dozen test methods to ensure that when you call that one method you always get your expected results.  So, speaking of unit tests, you're typically not writing ONE unit test to test an existing (or new) method, rather you're creating a number of small unit tests to be concise.

The Triple A Pattern:

Why not just write functional tests as they test higher up?
http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/not-just-slow-integration-tests-are-a-vortex-of-doom

Should the Singleton get blasted some more?!  Michael tries to defend his true love...

Unit tests should be able to run out of order - this "proves" that you don't have any bad dependencies lying around.

Should you test first?

These find your tests and runs them and tells you what succeeds and what fails, typically looking at classes that have been attributed as test classes.

.NET teseting frameworks:

Java's primary testing framework is JUnit
http://junit.org/

Huge list of testing resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks

Code Complete - excellent guide on complete programming

Art of Unit Testing - Learn to unit test from the ground up

Structuring Your Unit Tests

Pluralsight - Test First Development

Pluralsight - Test First Development, Part 2

DotCover - JetBrains tool for seeing your code's test coverage

Joe found a new podcast he loves - http://www.defensivesecurity.org/

Michael loves DotCover from JetBrains - https://www.jetbrains.com/dotcover/

Allen has found his new keyboard fling, the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic

We’re back to the gang of four, continuing with another segment of design patterns. This time we’re talking about some of our favorite Behavioral Design Patterns: Observer, Chain of Responsibilities, Iterator patterns. Also, why the visitor pattern is weird and what it’s like to be raked over hot coals.