It was a dark and stormy night. The kind of night envisioned by Mr. Bulwer-Lytton when he penned his infamously bad opening sentence, but the weather was not a deterrent to Craig. Craig faced a task more daunting than mere lightning and rain. He was on the trail of an annoying bug and was determined to track it down come hell or high water (a possibility made more real given the weather).

How Craig came to this point is not unfamiliar to anyone who writes code. It was the last day of the sprint, in fact, it was more like the last hours of the sprint. He had been struggling mightily against the whims of programming fortune all day (and into the evening) trying to stamp out the final stubborn bugs in a feature that was his responsibility. A feature that, if it wasn’t delivered, would mean a failed sprint for the entire team.

Down to one last issue, all he needed to do was to figure out the inner workings of the following line of code.

nonRunnerForm.MidPrice = ((Convert.ToDecimal(row.Item(HermesColumns.Events.LiveBuyPrice)) + _
   Convert.ToDecimal(row.Item(HermesColumns.Events.LiveSellPrice)) ) / 2D)

In and of itself, this is not an egregious example of bad code. In fact, it looks like code found in a wide variety of production grade applications. And yet when the line was executed, the value of nonRunnerForm.MidPrice was 0.

Always.

Regardless of what values were found in the row.Item array.

Craig found numerous ways to beat his head against this particular wall. He checked the types of the variables involved. He checked for the possibility of integer division. He rechecked the variable types. Still the storm continued to rage both outside and inside his office.

Then, in a flash of insight, lightning struck. Metaphorically, that is.

With thunder still rumbling through his office, Craig stepped into the nonRunnerForm.MidPrice property and this is what he found:

Public Property MidPrice() As Decimal
   Get
      Return mMidPrice
   End Get
   Set(ByVal value As Decimal)
      ctlNonRunnerPad.MidPrice = value
   End Set
End Property

Problem solved. Feature delivered. The team celebrated a successful sprint. And Craig has become a vocal advocate for writing unit tests, even for properties.

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