Test driven development is hard. Perhaps it would not be if we were taught to think about OO development from a TDD perspective in the first place; but those muscles are poorly developed, and the exercise leaves you sore and panting a bit. As with physical exercise, there is a reward in the pain. Perhaps others do not see it, but I can already see the benefits accruing in Reggie as I rebuild it with SOLID principles in mind, driven by tests. To help me consolidate where I’m going, and help others whose TDD muscles are likewise under-developed, let us walk through a test, shall we?

Reggie, my regular expression testing application, has been rebuilt in the Caliburn Micro framework, using Ninject for Inversion of Control and MoQ to round out the unit tests.

Now that I've learned something about WPF, and that "out of the box" it is not entirely trivial to work with, it seemed worthwhile to rebuild the app using a standard framework, viz Caliburn Micro. The Mindscape Blog offers a friendlier CM tutorial than the one on the project's website.

In addition, I simplified the architecture by removing the separate business layer. The business logic is so light that it is not worth the effort (20 lines!). I will refactor if doing so provides a real benefit.

I've started a new project on CodePlex, called Reggie, and posted the initial working source code. Reggie's goal is to be a simple developer tool for writing and testing Regular Expressions. It is inspired by the venerable Regulator tool and will be created in WPF using the MVVM pattern.