Leveraging CloudNimble.Breakdance for Unit Testing

[robertmclaws]

Hey folks! Wanted to bring up a topic near and dear to me as you folks spin up this project: Unit testing.

One of the biggest challenges of contributing to OData is the diversity of unit test approaches within the same projects. We dealt with this heavily when we contributed to the OData 8.0 release.

I wanted to point out that my company built an OSS framework for accelerating unit test development, powered by many of the concepts that were in OData a long time ago, and evolved for .NET Core. It's called Breakdance, and it's designed to let you consistently spin up in-memory services, with full DI support.

We leverage it extensively and exclusively to test Restier, and it cuts our test code down by 50-75%. We can also use it to do things like validating metadata output, verifying public API consistency, and there are runtime dotnet breakdance tools to find test baseline manifests in the codebase and automatically generate them.

Since you're starting fresh, I think it would make your lives so much easier... and it would be a huge help for the framework to validate that it works with gRPC and the other protocols you want to support.

Thanks for your consideration.