Although most .NET developers are probably familiar with the concept of unit testing, it's worth reviewing briefly here. Generally speaking, unit tests are programs designed to figuratively break apart your application into independent blocks, or units, based on specific functions, and then test those blocks to ensure they function as intended. To put it another way, unit tests allow us to take any function in our application and, given a specific set of inputs, test to ensure that the function is returning the correct values or failing gracefully.

Including unit tests in your solutions offers several advantages. Since unit tests work on small, manageable chunks of code, they naturally train a developer to create methods that are less complex and more focused on a single task. Also, as unit tests exist outside the normal process flow of the application, it's possible...