Month: November 2010

Some things to keep in mind when writing units tests for code that use async methods: You’re not trying to test the framework’s “awaitability” and you’re not trying to test framework methods that are “awaitable”.  You want to test your code in certain isolation contexts.  One context, of course, is independent of asynchronicity–do individual units of code that don’t depend on asynchronous invocation “work”…  e.g. “Task<string> MyMethodAsync()”, you want to have a unit test that make sure this method does what it’s supposed to do (one being it returns a “valid” Task<string> object, the other being that individual side-effects occur, … Continue reading Testing Strategies Involving Async Functions

I’ve blogged about closures in C# and their pitfalls before.  I keep seeing problems with closures–more now that lambdas expressions and statements (“lambdas”) are becoming more widespread–even with experienced developers. So, I’d thought i’d post about some of the details surrounding where the C# compiler generates closures in the hopes that people will recognize more where they write code that creates a closure and its context. The C# language spec does not refer specifically to “closures”, with regard to capturing state for anonymous methods (including lambdas)–it refers to “outer variables” and “captured outer variables”.  The captured outer variables for a specific … Continue reading Deep Dive on Closure Pitfalls