Allowing .Net unit tests to access internal members

Good code encapsulation requires that various members be marked as private, or at least internal. However this can make it difficult for unit test frameworks such as NUnit to access them.

You can grant an external (e.g. unit test) assembly access to internal members by doing the following:

1. Give your test assembly a strong name (via Project Properties, Signing, Sign the assembly)
2. Compile the assembly (eg. My.Test.dll)
3. Open the Visual Studio command prompt
4. Navigate to the folder where My.Test.dll got built
5. Run:  sn -Tp My.Test.dll
6. This will display the full public key for the signed assembly. Copy it. (it'll be about 320 chars)
7. Open the AssemblyInfo.cs file for the assembly containing the code with internals to be tested.
8. Enter a line such as: [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("My.Test, PublicKey=1234")] where 1234 is the full key generated in step 6.

Note: this only works if the full key is used, not the shorter summary key.

How to mock an Angular service for testing

To inject a fake version of myService, and intercept calls to myMethod, do something like this:

Or check out the cool video here.

    var myMethodFake = function() { ... };

    beforeEach(function () {
        module(function ($provide) {
            mockMyService = {
                myMethod: jasmine.createSpy('myMethod').andCallFake(myMethodFake)
            };
            $provide.value('myService', mockMyService);
        });
    });

    it('does stuff', inject(function(myService) {
       myService.myMethod();
    });

Default IE XSLT for viewing XML

Being blogged just because it shouldn't have taken me nearly as long to figure this out as it did.

How to download the default XSLT template that IE uses for viewing XML. (The pretty looking one with collapsible/expandable elements):

1. Use Visual Studio
2. Click File | Open | File
3. Open C:\Windows\System32\msxml3.dll  (because VS knows what to do with a DLL)
4. Expand to: XML \ DEFAULTSS.XML
5. Right-click and Export..
6. Save it as an .xsl

All done.