Many of our Java platform customers have taken advantage of our Service Virtualization. However, over the past few years, we‘ve received constant requests from our customers who have their applications on the .NET platform to enable them to use Service Virtualization as well. As a result, we are now proud to announce the availability of SV4dotNet. Developers on the .NET platform to create Virtual Services as a part of their unit testing. Let’s see how. 

Unit Testing Basics

Let me start out with a brief intro to Unit Testing and why it is one of the important functions of the SDLC. As a best practice, developers will first write code and then test it. Unit testing involves testing a ‘unit’ component in isolation. This ‘unit’ component is an integral aspect of the entire code. The reason for this testing is to validate that this ‘unit’ of code performs as designed. Many such ‘units’ constitute towards the feature and eventually the code base.

Unit testing benefits include:

• Determining if the code is modular
• Understanding the functionality and usability of the unit’s interface
• Enabling regression testing 
• Finding problems earlier in the SDLC

The last benefit is the most important one because it enables enormous cost savings, because the cost to fix defects in Acceptance testing or even in Production systems is huge! 

The Role of Service Virtualization in Unit Testing

This brings me to today’s discussion. The last benefit mentioned above is also one of the topmost use cases of Service Virtualization. I’ve heard members of the developer community say, “My development teams experience delays due to unavailable dependencies” and also “My development teams have restrictions like access fees or time limits that cause delays”. 

This is where Service Virtualization plays a massive role. SV stands in for dependencies by enabling the developers to continue with their Unit testing and without having to wait for access to the real services.

What is SV4dotNet?

SV4dotNet is a simple lightweight library that follows the as-code approach. It enables developers on the .NET platform to create Virtual Services as a part of their Unit testing. They are able to consume the Virtual Service that is standing for their dependent system within the same Unit test. The Virtual Service can be created from well known specifications like WSDL, RR pairs, and Swagger, as well as our proprietary VSM/VSI & Mar files. 

Frameworks Supported by SV4dotNet

• .NET framework 4.8 and below
• NUnit 3.0 
• Visual Studio 2017, 2019
• Visual Studio Code 

Virtual Services Deployment

Our customers have the choice of deploying the Virtual Services to two locations -

• An existing SV/DevTest VSE 
• BlazeVSE (which is deployed from the BlazeMeter Continuous Testing platform)

How Do I Get Started with SV4dotNet?

 You can find an introduction to SV4dotNet including setup/config here.

Where do I download the SV4dotNet library?

Download library: http://github.com/CA-DevTest/SV4dotNet

For any questions: Please reach out to Koustubh.Warty@broadcom.com