Starting off on the write foot...

...and by that I mean writing tests....

It has been a few frustrating sessions at Dallas Geek Night.

I've looked at a couple of technologies for writing iOS apps (even though I don't yet have an iPhone or iPad).

• mobl is like a DSL where you can declaratively layout screens and controls and will run in a webkit based browser.
• MonoTouch is a commercial plugin for MonoDevelop that allows you to write iOS apps in C#

I've also looked at partychapp.

So what is my frustration? Tests or the lack thereof.
When I start to work on a project I want to be able to quickly start writing unit tests.

Most recently looking at partychapp:

• the tests (JUnit 3 instead of 4) are intermixed with the regular code
• the 'tests' are mostly related to the persisting of objects in 'fake' data stores
• the package layout/structure doesn't communicate clearly which are the core [important] classes

I spent an hour trying to extract a class and add relevant tests. I got frustrated and reverted all my changes to try again another time.

My frustration with MonoTouch lies mainly about how to get NUnit working for the types of tests I wanted to write. Of course that may be an issue where I don't understand NUnit in MonoDevelop so I'll need to do some more research.

My frustration with mobl is in trying to extend the assert structures so I could write easier to understand (for me) tests. I was also frustrated with the default display of the unit test results.

Since I'm finding myself frustrated it must mean I have a great opportunity to contribute.

'Watch this space' for what I'm hoping will be actual contributions or productive experiences.