How to simulate network failure for test purposes (in C#)?

Question

I\'m building what could be called the DAL for a new app. Unfortunately, network connectivity to the database is a real problem.

I\'d like to be able to temporarily

Answer 1

If you are trying a complete network outage for your application unplugging the network cable will work. Sometimes you might have a data access layer with multiple data sources (on different machines) in which case you can simulate an exception in your tests with a Mock Framework like Rhino Mocks. Here is some pseudo-code that you may have in your test

void TestUserDBFailure()
{
    // ***** THIS IS PSEUDO-CODE *******
    //setting up the stage - retrieval of the user info create an exception
    Expect.Call(_userRepository.GetUser(null))
       .IgnoreArguments()
       .Return(new Exception());

    // Call that uses the getuser function, see how it reacts
    User selectedUser = _dataLoader.GetUserData("testuser", "password");        
}