Getting Started

This course will provide a comprehensive guide to using the xUnit testing library on .NET to write automated tests and perform test-driven development. It will focus on xUnit capabilities, the principles of test-driven development (TDD), and the best practices of automated testing.

Target audience

This course is aimed at .NET developers looking to both improve their automated testing skills and learn how to apply TDD. The course assumes no prior knowledge of xUnit, automated testing, or TDD because all these concepts will be covered in the lessons.

Automated testing and TDD significantly improve the quality of the code and reduce the number of bugs. Therefore, any software developer will benefit from learning these concepts.

Moreover, this course will focus on xUnit, which is one of three most widely used testing frameworks available on .NET. Although all the code samples in the course will use xUnit, the fundamental concepts and best practices shown in the lessons will apply equally to any other testing framework. As a result, if the learner happens to be on a team that doesn’t use xUnit, they can quickly adapt these concepts to their team’s preferred testing framework.

Prerequisites

All code samples in this course are written in C#, so course requires basic knowledge of this language. Moreover, learners should be familiar with the following concepts:

• Knowledge of fundamental C# syntax and keywords.

• Experience with classes and interfaces.

• Understanding of methods, fields, and properties.

• Knowledge of namespaces.

• The ability to use access modifiers.

• Experience in annotating methods with attributes.

Learners will also need to understand the basics of .NET, including the following:

• The structure of the Program.cs file and the application startup logic.

• The basic structure of a .csproj file.

• Adding third-party NuGet packages to a project.

Course roadmap