This tweet stopped me in my tracks because I couldn’t reply in a tweet:

Stephen Coulson @sdcoulson

@julielerman In your opinion what is the best solution for unit testing#EF dependent code?#MockingFramework? #SQLCE? or other?

It’s a loaded question so I’ll just answer briefly.

First: it depends! 🙂 It always depends.

Do you mean unit tests or integration tests? A unit test shouldn’t be hitting a database.

FAKING FOR UNIT TESTS

I use fakes to avoid hitting a database when I truly want to do a unit test on code that’s trying to do data access. I (and many others) have written extensively about faking with EF. I have some old blog posts and book chapters that do this with EF4 but not using code first or dbcontext.

In my DbContext book I have some examples of faking with DbContext (ala EF4.1 & EF5).

I have a module in one of my Pluralsight courses on testing with EF (Entity Framework in the Enterprise).

MOCKING FRAMEWORKS FOR UNIT TEST

I’ve had a hard time finding good current examples of using mocking frameworks with EF. Typemock has one that’s terribly outdated and not useful. I found one person who’s written a little about using Moq with EF.

SQL CE FOR INTEGRATION TESTS

Sure you can use SQL CE. It’s a perfectly good way to go. Here’s a blog post by Eric Hexter to get you started:

Using sql compact for integration tests with entity framework

CODE FIRST DATABASE INITIALIZATION FOR INTEGRATION TESTS

This is what I use. One of the intializers is “DropCreateDatabaseAlways”. I use that combined with some seed data to refresh my database for each integration test. This is one of the methods I show in my Pluralsight course.

More More More!

There are plenty of other ways to go as well. For example, Lynn Langit has pointed me via twitter to ApprovalTests.

And just watch the comments fill up with other suggestions.

Hope this helps, Stephen! 🙂