Adding Template Classes to Visual Studio 2013's "Add New Item" Screen (NUnit Test Class)

When using Visual Studio,  if you follow Test Driven Development principles, then you're probably used to repeatedly following these steps when adding a new test class (using NUnit as an example):

1. Right click on Solution Explorer
2. Click Add  and then New Item
3. Selecting Class from the list of items
4. Entering your test class name
5. Typing in or pasting similar looking lines of code:

using System;
using NUnit.Framework;
 
namespace MyProject
{
    [TestFixture]
    public class MyTestClass
    {
 
        [Test]
        public void Test()
        {
        }
 
    }
}

Performance Testing Framework

In this post I’ll introduce a set of performance testing classes and practices that I use when creating automated performance tests – with one main aim: simplify the task of measuring/verifying the performance of key areas of my .NET applications.

Source Code:
 

Often it is not practical, nor even recommended to measure all parts of an application – why waste time profiling sections of code that get called infrequently?  It’s also rather difficult knowing exactly where to start profiling an application, whether it’s server or UI, when that app either hasn’t had performance proactively “baked in” or when you’re trying to find the root cause of an occasional freeze. 

If I’m trying to isolate performance issues (or maybe retrofitting performance tests), then I tend to start off by using any of the popular . NET profiling apps, such as Red Gate’s ANTS.   These give me an idea of where to look, eg for methods that are called very frequently or take a while to run.  At least this gives me a fighting chance of where to concentrate my efforts, rather than wading through 1000s of lines of code…needle in a hay stack springs to mind.

There are many resources available showing common coding pitfalls, which can result in extra memory allocates that aren’t needed, making non-deterministic functions behave in a deterministic fashion, lack of caching, multiple enumerations etc.  Such examples include:

• string concatenation rather than using a StringBuilder, 
• switch versus multiple if statements, 
• caching values for ToString/GetHashCode on immutable types

Code Block/Scope Timing Snippet

You've got users complaining that it takes too long for a screen to open or for a certain piece of code to run.  Wouldn't it be handy to wrap the execution of a key block of code with some timing statistics?

The following TimeIt class is derived from IDisposable which makes it easy to wrap a code block (aka scope) with the using keyword (this will ensure that if any exceptions are raised you'll still get to final end scope logged).

The timing internals are hidden way - it's easily accessed via a static Log method:

using (TimeIt.Log("Calculate cost"))
{

    Debug.WriteLine("Retrieving price..");
    var price = pricingService.GetPrice();
    var cost = notionalCalculator.GetUSDValue(price);
}