During the DevTeach seminar that occured in Montreal in May I got an awesome opportunity to pair deliver a TDD workshop with Scott Bellware. One of the things he got me hooked on was using natural sentences as a test naming convention. So instead of this:

ShouldBeAbleToTransferFundsBetweenAccounts

You write it out like this:

Should be able to transfer funds between accounts.

Of course, only one of these is legitimate from a compilation perspective. So Scott had written a macro that would replace all of the spaces in the test name with underscore. You invoked it by highlighting the name of the test and hitting a key combination that was bound to the macro. Which would convert the natural sentence to the following:

Should_be_able_to_transfer_funds_between_accounts.

During the last course, Terry Hughes improved upon the macro so that now all I have to do is type out the name of the test and hit ALT + _ (that is what I have the macro bound to). I don’t need to select the name of the test.

It is a subtle change, but one that allows me to just write out the name of my test without worrying about camel casing or underscores.

Here is the macro:

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CodeEditor
    Sub ReplaceSpacesInTestNameWithUnderscores()
        If DTE.ActiveDocument Is Nothing Then Return

        Dim selection As TextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection(), EnvDTE.TextSelection)
        selection.SelectLine()

        If selection.Text = "" Then Return

        Dim prefix As String = "public void "
        Dim index As Integer = selection.Text.IndexOf(prefix)
        prefix = selection.Text.Substring(0, index) + prefix

        Dim description As String = selection.Text.Replace(prefix, String.Empty)

        selection.Text = prefix + description.Replace(" ", "_").Replace("'", "_")
        selection.LineDown()
        selection.EndOfLine()
    End Sub
End Module

This video shows the macro in action.

Enjoy