I’ve just started a new open source project you might be interested in if you use both TDD and Entity Framework 6.1.0.

It’s called Blink, and you can get hold of the pre-release binaries on NuGet and the source on GitHub.

Here’s the problem it tries to solve. (If you have this problem, let me know!)

When performing automated testing, it can be very expensive to initialize a fresh, real database. So expensive that you avoid testing against the real database at all costs. For example, the project that inspired me to start this library takes about a minute to build its database; that’s fine in a deployment scenario, but intolerable if you want to write tens or hundreds of integration tests. Blink re-initialises the DB in ~3s. That’s fast enough for TDD, if you’re careful about which tests you run.

It’s a very young project, currently so young it’s not really designed to be used on other people’s machine’s quite yet — there are some hard-coded strings that need replacing before it’ll work on anything other than a default instance of SQL Server 2012 x64, for instance. That’ll come soon, though.

This blog post is more of an announcement, though. If you’re interested, get in touch via the comments. Let me know if the project looks useful to you. We’ll see if we can’t make something good.

Here’s roughly what the code looks like;

// Create a new BlinkDBFactory, maybe inside [TestInitialize] or [SetUp]
var factory = Blink.BlinkDB.CreateDbFactory<TestDbContext, TestDbConfiguration>(
    BlinkDBCreationMode.UseDBIfItAlreadyExists,
     () => new TestDbContext());

// Execute code, inside a transaction;
factory.ExecuteDbCode(context =>
{
    // use the context here;

});

// db edits are rolled back automatically