Extracting functions to enable unit testing about sharepointdsc

[whozDougie]

Such a simple concept! Would love to see this in action say a video demo!

[anlynes]

Seems like a fair idea to me. Mocking has been a "thing" for ages and is not an onerous activity when compared to the benefits.

[prajeeshprathap]

@BrianFarnhill I've used FluentShellUnit to create a stub for SPWebApplication in my scripts. http://blogsprajeesh.blogspot.nl/2015/02/fluentshellunit-create-stub-from-script.html

If you want to write the unit tests using MSTest and want to test the scripts, then you can use the FluentShellUnit project from GitHub or from the nuget server

[BrianFarnhill]

@prajeeshprathap - love the idea, is there any way we could achieve this in something purely PowerShell based that we could work in to Pester? We need to line up with all of the other DSC Resources that execute tests in PowerShell with Pester, do you think we could adapt that C# in to script?

[prajeeshprathap]

@BrianFarnhill You can do the same with PowerShell as well. The idea is to create a proxy function for the SharePoint cmdlets after the context is loaded and then whenever you make a call to the actual cmdlets, the proxies will be executed.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/03/01/proxy-functions-spice-up-your-powershell-core-cmdlets.aspx

[BrianFarnhill]

I have an approach to enable better unit testing without needing to stub all of the methods out in our script. I wrote a blog post on the topic and am almost finished incorporating this in to a pull request with the fixes and expanded test base. I'll close this issue once I push the script in to a pull request, but in the mean time here is the blog post on how it is done:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_farnhill/archive/2015/09/10/how-to-unit-test-powershell-scripts-that-call-cmdlets-from-the-sharepoint-snap-in.aspx

[BrianFarnhill]

This approach is now fixed to PR #78 and should be merged to dev shortly. I will close when the code review is complete

[BrianFarnhill]

This is now merged in to the dev branch and will be in the next release - closing this issue