Practical, Pragmatic Agile
I've recently done work at a company where there are no automated tests, and tests aren't part of the culture. I've been writing tests for so long now that it's jarring to consider working without them, so I've gone ahead and written tests for my part of the work. As I've done so it's really brought home the advantages of writing tests, and I wanted to list them out.
I recently reused my generic, disposable WCF service client, and made some changes to make it simpler to use and easier to unit test. Here's what I did.
In my most recent project we had to support classes with fairly deep object graphs where any of the nodes could validly be null. We didn't want to have lots of 'if not null' checks everywhere, so I wrote an extension method which takes an expression of any length and returns the expression value or a default value if any of the nodes are null. Here's the extension method code, along with an overview of how it works.
WatiN lets you attach to browser windows so you can verify their contents and close them as part of your tests, but the standard API doesn't detect windows with PDF documents in them. Here's an extension method which does.
WatiN's DomContainer.WaitForComplete() method pauses test execution until the DOM has finished loading, but if your page has functions registered with JQuery's ready() function, you'll probably want to wait for those to finish executing before testing it. Here's a WatiN extension method which pauses test execution until that happens.