Practice Test Driven Development with C# Exercises on Exercism.io

I was recently introduced to Exercism.io which is a place where you can download a number of C# exercises to work on. Exercism.io not only supports C# but also other programming languages. Each exercise comes with a pre-written suite of unit tests and it is your task to implement the required functionality in order to make the unit tests pass.

The exercises are a good way to get familiar with Test Driven Development (TDD) without having to write the tests. You can still semi-follow the prescribed red-green-refactor approach, where you initially have a test that fails, you then write an implementation to make the test pass and then you refactor your implementation until you're happy with it.

The Exercism.io website provides a useful command line interface tool which you use to fetch exercises and then also submit your solutions. Once a solution is submitted, it is made available on Exercism.io for others to "nitpick". This is a great feature where others who have done the same exercise can view your solution and suggest improvements. Although I've found the C# community on Exercism.io to be fairly quiet (with only a few people nitpicking), I can see this being a very useful feature once more people start to use the site.

If you've also heard of Project Euler (which I blogged about here), then yes, Exercism.io is similar in principle, but there are differences which you'll find quickly after trying both sites. I've tried a few exercises in the C# section of Exercism.io - they are fun and a good to practice your C#/.NET framework knowledge. Highly recommend this site to anyone who enjoys small programming exercises in their spare time and anyone who is interested in trying TDD. You can get started here.