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With a properly architected Silverlight application, unit testing should come naturally. Using a pattern like MVVM, testing the view models should become second nature.

However, you need to be aware of the differences of the unit testing frameworks available. The Silverlight Unit Testing Framework (isn’t that acronym brilliant) works well as an in-browser framework. Couple this with StatLite and you even can have a headless mode running.

Isolator version 6.0, dubbed Typemock Isolator 2010, includes support for Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, a dedicated Silverlight unit testing solution and more. those of you who want to get it right away just click here. Since the last release we’ve added quite a few nifty features:

You might have noticed the lack of x64/x86 installer – we’ve merged both installers so that you won’t have to download two files anymore.

The "Simplified MVVM" pattern allows a programmer to create an application that has absolutely no UI (user interface). The programmer only creates a ViewModel and a Model. A designer with no programming ability at all, is then able to start with a blank page and completely create the View (UI) in Microsoft Expression Blend 4 (or higher). If you are new to "Simplified MVVM" it is suggested that you read Silverlight MVVM: An (Overly) Simplified Explanation for an introduction.

So in this post i will use the same simple Demo Application for the previous modal dialogs post but I will add few Unit Tests using Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and Silverlight verstion of RhinoMocks.

Our Sample app is very simple and just shows a view with list of some User entities.

As it’s an introductory post, I will not talk about TDD or stub or mock in this article. (But I promise those things will come in next post. )

An early preview set of bits are online at http://jeffatmix.com/ – and the next release of the Silverlight Toolkit when Silverlight 4 ships will contain support for the phone officially. Stay tuned for more.

I started with the Simple Dialog Service in Silverlight and extended the example a bit. In the post, I promised that abstracting the dialog function behind an interface would facilitate unit testing. In this post, I'll deliver on the promise.

In this post Nigel Sampson discusses Blendable MVVM, Dependency Injection and Unit Testing.

There are a couple of great reasons for using a UI separation pattern such as Model, View, ViewModel (or the more common MVP and MVC), the first being that with the application logic separated from the view logic the application becomes easier to maintain. Secondly it's usually easier for a designer and developer to work on the separate areas and integrate them at a later date (this actually helps enforce the separation). And thirdly by having the application logic away from the UI it becomes much easier to test.

Modularity allows applications to be broken down into discrete pieces. This allows for easier testing, better maintainability and the ability to distribute an application across multiple teams. This video explores the modularity support in Prism. The first part of the video covers Unity and Unit Testing. Inversion of Control using Dependency Injection and Service Location are both covered. The second part of the video details modules and how they're loaded by the Module Catalog.