One of the items I was most interested in finding out about iOS Development was using Unit Tests. To my great delight, the first "Hello World" app walkthrough that I watched, pointed out that Tests come in the default project when you create a new App Project. So I immediately wanted to try out the Tests and see what they are all about.
As someone that has been learning about TDD practices, it came as a bit of a nice surprise that the default Tests, actually fail when I tried to run them without any code. Based on the TDD mantra of Red, Green, Refactor; you would want your Tests to fail first to ensure that your changes would then fix the broken code into a working system.
Looking into the Test Class, I see some code that looks fairly familiar to what I am used to when I create Unit Tests in .NET. There are setUp and tearDown functions that would be used before and after each test. And a single Test function that appears to be throwing an exception because it has not been modified to pass the test yet. It also appears that within that Exception throw, that a message is being built similarly to a String.Format in .NET.
Another reason for wanting to look into iOS development is the speed at which new technologies are coming out. It seems like .NET has focused on making sure that it is backwards compatible and able to work on code from 20+ years ago. iOS development code could not be more than 6 years old at this point, and I would guess that it probably has to be much newer than that. As Apple has pushed forward with new OSes and Devices, they have left behind the old stuff. I think moving forward and onward with better approaches and practices is generally a good idea, but it can sometimes be difficult to sell that idea if the changes you want to make don't provide any direct benefit to the customer. With iOS, you have a built in benefit to the customer, the old code will not work, we have to upgrade or our App will be broken.
Similarly the Xcode IDE is getting upgraded at a very fast pace. Visual Studio has also been getting upgraded very frequently. However, to get all of the features of Xcode, I need to pay nothing. Where to get the minimum features to be functional in Visual Studio, I need to pay $500 and the price goes up from there as you add more functionality. I completely see the value in Visual Studio and love using it. The value and time you get from the price is well worth it. However, it can sometimes be a struggle to get your company to see that and get you upgraded. With VS seemingly on a path of upgrading once a year or so, that cost is going to get harder and harder to convince others of it worth. With iOS development, you won't have to worry about that. You will have the latest and greatest as soon as it is available, because it is free.
As someone that has been learning about TDD practices, it came as a bit of a nice surprise that the default Tests, actually fail when I tried to run them without any code. Based on the TDD mantra of Red, Green, Refactor; you would want your Tests to fail first to ensure that your changes would then fix the broken code into a working system.
Looking into the Test Class, I see some code that looks fairly familiar to what I am used to when I create Unit Tests in .NET. There are setUp and tearDown functions that would be used before and after each test. And a single Test function that appears to be throwing an exception because it has not been modified to pass the test yet. It also appears that within that Exception throw, that a message is being built similarly to a String.Format in .NET.
Another reason for wanting to look into iOS development is the speed at which new technologies are coming out. It seems like .NET has focused on making sure that it is backwards compatible and able to work on code from 20+ years ago. iOS development code could not be more than 6 years old at this point, and I would guess that it probably has to be much newer than that. As Apple has pushed forward with new OSes and Devices, they have left behind the old stuff. I think moving forward and onward with better approaches and practices is generally a good idea, but it can sometimes be difficult to sell that idea if the changes you want to make don't provide any direct benefit to the customer. With iOS, you have a built in benefit to the customer, the old code will not work, we have to upgrade or our App will be broken.
Similarly the Xcode IDE is getting upgraded at a very fast pace. Visual Studio has also been getting upgraded very frequently. However, to get all of the features of Xcode, I need to pay nothing. Where to get the minimum features to be functional in Visual Studio, I need to pay $500 and the price goes up from there as you add more functionality. I completely see the value in Visual Studio and love using it. The value and time you get from the price is well worth it. However, it can sometimes be a struggle to get your company to see that and get you upgraded. With VS seemingly on a path of upgrading once a year or so, that cost is going to get harder and harder to convince others of it worth. With iOS development, you won't have to worry about that. You will have the latest and greatest as soon as it is available, because it is free.
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