July Meeting - Subcutaneous Testing in .NET / Actor programming with AKKA.NET

It's a double bill this month!

Subcutaneous Testing in .NET with Rob Moore

Unit tests, integration tests, automated UI tests - we're sure you've all heard of these, but what about subcutaneous tests? We've found these tests to be incredibly useful in our crusade to spend less time writing less tests, but get a good confidence and coverage of our codebase. At the end of the day we aren't paid to write tests - we are paid to deliver business value, so we believe any techniques, like subcutaneous tests, that help us in that regard that are valuable!

We will talk about what subcutaneous tests are, why they are useful and how we write them in .NET against ASP.NET MVC and Web API. We will also cover a bunch of techniques that help us manage some of the disadvantages with this style of testing and to help make the tests manageable as your application grows in complexity.

Akka.NET Actor Programming

Akka.NET (http://getakka.net/) is an open-source .NET port of the Akka actor programming toolkit and runtime from the JVM. The toolkit provides an abstraction layer to help programmers deal with the current challenges and optimise development for modern hardware and infrastructure: multi-core architecture, cloud infrastructure, and distributed computing.

We will talk about various actor programming concepts and fundamentals, and learn how to apply Akka.NET toolkit in your applications to make it scalable and fault-tolerant.