Now with Agent Ralph I have boiled my unit tests down to the point where they are just code snippets.  Adding a new test case is as simple as dropping a csharp file into a directory.  It is automatically picked up and fed into a test harness, which parses the code and gets all Ralphy on it.  Here’s a sample, right out of the repo:

using System;
namespace AgentRalph.CloneCandidateDetectionTestData
{
    public class CloneInForeachBlock
    {
        void Target()
        {
            foreach (int i in new int[] { })
            {
                /* BEGIN */
                Console.WriteLine(7);
                /* END */
            }
        }

        private void Expected()
        {
            Console.WriteLine(7);
        }
    }
}

This sample comes from the CloneCandidateDetectionTestData folder.  Any file in that folder is assumed to hold a class containing at least two methods, Target and Expected.  Target is scanned for clones, and the test passes if a clone is found that matches Expected AND consists of all the code between the START and END ‘markup’ embedded in the comments.   Thanks to the magic of MbUnit’s generative tests each code file appears as it’s own test, as if each were a method with it’s own [Test] attribute.  So you see, whipping up new tests is crazy easy.

Occasionally an idea for a test case will come to me, and it’s usually when I’m at a place where I have no access to Agent Ralph code.  Like work.  Typically I’d make some notes in an email and code it up when I got home.  It got me thinking, I don’t really need Visual Studio and the whole dev setup to create these test cases.  They’re just simple code snippets, scraped out of a directory.  I could be scraping them from anywhere, like off a wiki even.  The next thought of course was to run that test automatically.  How could I put this all together?

And there you have it, coding in the cloud!  This graphic ought to help you fully grasp the awesomeness.